Their example before us
By 
We are fortunate that great historians and intellectuals like Robert Paxton and now Christopher Browning are stepping forward at this moment to point out the many parallels between Trumpism in America in 2024, and Germany in the crucial months at the end of 1932 and the beginning of 1933. Between August and March, Adolph Hitler went from the about to be fully discredited leader of a rapidly declining political party, that, in the context of the liberal democracy that was the Weimar Republic, seemed on the verge of electoral collapse, to the absolute dictator of a completely radicalized fascist state.
This astonishing trajectory is examined by three recent books Browning reviews. Some excerpts from his essay:
President Paul von Hindenburg’s closest confidant, General Kurt von Schleicher, had two goals: ousting Germany’s unpopular, presidentially appointed chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, and harnessing Hitler’s popularity to carry out an authoritarian revision of the democratic Weimar Constitution that Germany’s upper-class conservative nationalists did not have sufficient popular support to achieve on their own. The devious Schleicher could not operate openly, since he had initially recommended Brüning, and Hindenburg had nothing but disdain for the Nazis. That spring Hitler had run against Hindenburg in the presidential election, forcing him into a humiliating runoff to secure his second term. (Ryback notes without further comment that Hitler challenged the election results in court and when the case was dismissed declared victory regardless.)
The result for the Nazis [of the November 6 1932 election] was a debacle. Since 1929 they had gone from one success to another in local, state, and federal elections, creating an impression of inexorable momentum toward ultimate victory. On November 6, 1932, the bubble burst. The Nazis lost two million votes, dropping to 33.1 percent of the total. The big winners were the Communists (up nearly 700,000 votes, to 16.9 percent) and Alfred Hugenberg’s right-wing Nationalists (up 800,000 votes, from 5.9 to 8.8 percent). Ryback concludes: “By mid-November 1932, Hitler’s movement was essentially bankrupt, not only financially but also politically.” His all-or-nothing gamble had failed, and the endless campaigning of 1932 had exhausted the party’s finances. As it was now both deeply in debt and had experienced electoral defeat, new fundraising proved futile, and demoralization within the party intensified.
How was this apparently fatal political trajectory reversed?
Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days starts with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30. Fritzsche notes that there “was no such thing as majority opinion” in fragmented Germany and that the “political system had checkmated itself.” Thus the fate of the country lay in the hands of a small clique of right-wingers around Hindenburg, who were determined not only to exclude the left (the revolutionary Communists as well as the ardently prodemocratic Social Democrats) but also to “destroy the republic and establish a dictatorship.” He continues, “In order to smash the Weimar Republic the men in the room needed the Nazis, and to lever themselves into power, the Nazis needed the men in the room.” Hitler’s realization of his indispensability to the conservatives allowed him to hold out for six months until he got the minimum deal he needed: the chancellorship, an inept cabinet of conservative partners who totally underestimated him, a pliant president who would sanction the use of whatever emergency presidential powers he requested, and a surge of popular enthusiasm that his coming to power would unleash among both his followers and many others. These factors enabled Hitler to carry out a “legal revolution” and establish a popularly supported dictatorship within a mere one hundred days after his appointment as chancellor. The crucial question for Fritzsche is what combination of coercion and consent lay behind this achievement.
I suggest particular attention be paid to this:
Despite this incredibly rapid imposition of unchecked dictatorial rule and the crippling of their opponents, in the palpably unfree elections of March 5, the Nazis won only 44 percent of the popular vote. Their coalition partners garnered another 8 percent, giving the government a thin 52 percent majority. The challenge Fritzsche sets himself is to explain how the Nazi regime managed “to erode” so much of this silenced 48 percent within the next two months. If repression—always cast as counterterror against the Communist threat and necessary to preserve law and order—could neutralize opposition within five weeks, it nevertheless continued unabated thereafter. The new regime needed several more months to obtain willing identification with and consent from a significant majority of Germans.
Fritzsche makes the telling argument that violence not only silenced Nazi opponents but was also essential to building support. The ongoing violence, choreographed as public rituals of humiliation that portrayed Nazi opponents as weak and ridiculous, turned entertained spectators into accomplices by virtue of their “voyeuristic pleasure.” The “wave of denunciation” that swept over Germany broadened the ranks of complicity further. Fritzsche concludes that “violence preceded acclamation and proved to be one of its key ingredients. It became a regenerative force in the making of the national community.” Many flocked to the Nazis as opportunistic “March casualties,” but for many others the belief in national renewal and a restored Volksgemeinschaft,or people’s community (now understood as defined by racial exclusion rather than political, social, and religious inclusion), was sincere. Swept up in celebrations of renewal and unity, individuals “repositioned and reconfigured” themselves into “ideological congruence” with the Third Reich. Simultaneously, the “‘48 percent’ who had not voted for Hitler almost entirely disappeared from view” as they increasingly seemed “obsolescent” even to themselves.
And this:
Fritzsche examines the process by which many Germans were won over to National Socialism only after the seizure of power. Hett focuses on the mass of Germans who were already Nazis before January 1933. They formed a “large protest movement” that constituted a “cult of irrationality” engaged in a “revolution against reason.” This “rejection of rationality” and “contempt for truth and reason” was central to the rejection of the Enlightenment tradition, democracy, and the “liberal, capitalist West” by National Socialism as well as other interwar fascist movements. Hett concedes that such Germans could not have foreseen how their rejection of truth, reason, and rationality would lead to Babi Yar and Auschwitz, because those evils were as yet “unthinkable.” He ends with a presentist warning for the future: such an alibi will not hold today, since “we have their example before us.”
Read the whole thing.