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I think I need to read these books on Nazi Germany — 52 Comments

  1. One of the lessons of the Nazi rise to power it is important to learn is how a movement that is not supported by a majority of the population–such as, for example, leftism in the US–can nevertheless gain power in a democracy through democratic means, by conniving, lying about their intentions, ruthlessness, violence, threats and intimidation, cluelessness of their opponents about what they are up to, and a little bit of luck.

    The Nazis did this in an age where communication was regionally limited. One could say one thing in Bremen and a totally contradictory thing in Munich and each would be old news before the contradiction could have time to be noticed.

    One is tempted to say not so today with the presence of the 24/7 news cycle and the internet, but this only goes to underscore the importance of a free press. Obama has been successfully duplicating this tactic for 6 plus years because he has an obsequiously compliant press that plays down such contradictions. The only time the MSM sees daylight is when Obama opens his mouth to speak.

    This illustrates the great importance of traditionalists and conservatives 1) developing their own readily visible presence in the media, and 2) not permitting liberal support by the MSM to go uncriticized.

  2. I don’t pretend to understand the psyche of the average German before Hitler took power. The horrors of Communism including the Holodomor was in full swing at that very time very close to Germany. Many people probably voted for the Nazis because they thought the Nazis would protect them from the Communists.

  3. The immense power of the epithet – – for all their divergent aspects and context, “Jewish” and “racist” are remarkably similar in their psychological provenance and effect.

    BO and other American Leftists are not Nazis, true, because one is colored by race and nationality, the other by “class” and personal vanity (vaunted intellectual superiority).

    In all other respects BO and American Leftists are not very different from Nazis.

    Humans can tell the truth, seek objective fact, maintain a sense of fairness, proportion and integrity, recognize our common humanity and suffering, or we can be Nazis, BO, American Leftists, the Mafia or any number of variations on the bogus “insight” of the criminal mind, that “we” have discovered a more clever way. Ha, ha, ha.

    Common denominator of the clever people: the thrill of treating other human beings like shit for fun and profit.

    Common denominator of the boring people: the satisfaction of having a clean conscience.

    Every caring person needs to learn more and understand more deeply the Nazis, to see what is going on in the world – – NOT the policies, the means and methods. Here is the truth: the policies are irrelevant.

    But every caring person needs also to study Mao, learn about Mao, understand the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Mao is just as “great ” as Hitler, probably more so, mutatis mutandis.

    The horror is how so many millions want to participate in the personal “greatness” of a Hitler, a Mao, a Mohammed; to have the thrill of inflicting yet more suffering on other human beings.

  4. I am currently reading In the Garden of Beasts. It gives some interesting insight into the power struggles within the Nazis through the eyes of the American ambassador and his daughter.

    Dennis, I think in some ways Germany was still a feudal-thinking country. Each person had his niche in society and didn’t question those in other niches.

  5. Two indispensable books for understanding what happened in Germany: Sebastian Haffner’s memoir of growing up in that country between the wars, the (mistitled) “Defying Hitler,” and Hans Fallada’s classic novel Little Man, What Now?. I reviewed both and linked the reviews at my post Germany’s Descent in to Naziism.

    http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/46723.html

    Also, Erich Maria Remarque’s sadly-neglected novel The Road Back (which is sort of a sequel to his All Quiet on the Western Front) is important for understanding the psychological and social impact of the First World War. Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 article Who Would be a Nazi? speculate about what kinds of Americans would and would not go along with a Nazi-like movement. Above-linked post also links to the Dorothy Thompson article and to a review of the Remarque book.

  6. As Americans we take it for granted that people speak out against the government when we disagree with it. We often do not realize how rare and precious this right is.

    Most people in most places at most times during history do NOT contradict or challenge the ruling power but instead go along with it almost automatically, because very bad things can happen to you when you don’t.

  7. I don’t believe the Nazis ever lied about their intentions. Here’s their party platform in the presidential election in 1932:

    We demand the following:

    –A union of all Germans to form a great Germany on the basis of the right to self-determination of peoples.
    –Abolition of the Treaty of Versailles.
    –Return lands lost in World War I and colonies to give German adequate living space.
    –German blood as a requirement for German citizenship. No Jew can be a member of the nation.
    –Non-citizens can live in Germany only as foreigners, subject to the law of aliens.
    –Only citizens can vote or hold public office.
    –The state insures that every citizen live decently and earn his livelihood. If it is impossible to provide food for the whole population, then aliens must be expelled.
    –Guarantee for jobs and benefits for workers.
    –No further immigration of non-Germans. Any non-German who entered Germany after August 2, 1914, shall leave immediately.
    –A thorough reconstruction of our national system of education. The science of citizenship shall be taught from the beginning.
    –That German citizens and owners must publish all newspapers in the German language.
    –Eliminate the Marxist threat.

  8. Excellent essay and comments.
    Sadly, in the last decade, I have come to understand (by watching certain groups in America) how easily the good people of a “cultured nation” can fall victim to the minority of jackals in their midst.
    Which is why we must never give the jackals the power that they crave, and why Obama’s government by executive order and ignoring or “rewriting” laws he doesn’t like must come to an end and never be taken up by another President.

  9. The mannish boy, with the able assistance of the msm, has been lying like a dog under the porch. He constantly reverses course and his actions contradict what he said the day before. The fact that bho’s popularity numbers are not south of 20% indicates what happened in 1930s Germany can happen anywhere given the right economic conditions, a widespread public sense of their society unraveling, and a persuasive demagogue backed by an able propaganda apparatus.

  10. “what happened in 1930s Germany can happen anywhere given the right economic conditions, a widespread public sense of their society unraveling, and a persuasive demagogue backed by an able propaganda apparatus.” parker

    I would only add that the more ‘hostile the ground’ the more essential that it be ‘prepared’ properly. What happened in 1930’s Germany could not happen in 1930s America because the ground was not arable to cultivation of totalitarian ideologies. The Left of course has been preparing America’s ground since the 30’s. It may almost be time for the harvest.

  11. The Nazi’s were very effective in using propaganda once they came to power. The changed votes in a few weeks. Some excerpts from a recent paper on the subject.
    “we show that radio had a significant negative effect on the Nazi electoral support between 1929 and 1932, when political news were slanted against Nazi party. This effect was reversed in just 5 weeks following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the transfer of control of the radio to the Nazis. Pro-Nazi radio propaganda caused higher vote for the Nazis in March 1933 election.”
    The title: Radio and the Rise of the Nazi in Prewar Germany
    The full paper is here.
    https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00858992/document

  12. The way extreme or totalitarian regimes push the people like a herd is pushed by predators, is via presenting an internal or external threat. Real or imagined, doesn’t truly matter. For the Germans pre Reich, it was the Communists. Then it was the Jews. Then it was the capitalists in Britain and America. Then it was back to the Communists again after they broke their alliance.

    For the US, that external threat would be Islamic Jihad and the internal threat would be either Islamic Jihad or Mexicans or blacks or something else of that nature.

    That’s why it takes a totalitarian regime to exploit these things for more power. Most normal governments aren’t thinking quite that far ahead, they just want to solve the temporary security problem, not use it to further increase the fear of the people so that they can produce a coup de tat.

  13. Ann:

    How about a few little details like:

    –a widespread war of European conquest
    –a plan to enslave the Slavic peoples
    –the use of slave labor
    –genocide of the Jews of all of Europe
    –a wish that the German people and Germany be destroyed rather than surrender

    You may argue that even the Nazis didn’t have all of that planned at the outset, and that it evolved over time. But promises broken, and deceptions, were the name of the game for Hitler from the start.

    About his political ambitions:

    At the crest of his wave, with the audience primed, Hitler exclaimed “People of Germany, give us four years, and I swear as I took office so will I leave it. I did not work for reward. I did it for you!” At this the stadium exploded in a frenzy of cheering and emotion.

    This was the moment the entire speech was geared towards, and history of course shows us that he was lying. He didn’t leave office after four years and probably never intended to. He took power for himself, not for the people he ruled over.

    About his territorial ambitions:

    Hitler had promised British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the German people that the Sudetenland would be his “last territorial demand” in Europe. In reality, it was only the beginning.

    Hitler’s deceptiveness was purposeful and strategic.

  14. There was a zeitgeist of subjugating the individual to the group that permeated Germany going back centuries. How could people fall for that in the 20th century? What mechanisms rolled along on a daily basis to propagate tyranny?

    The best book I ever read about how Nazism worked and why it existed in the first place is The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff. He synthesizes the big picture philosophy with the concrete horrors it spawned. Published in the early 80s, it offered a cautionary analysis of trends in America. I understand a new edition is coming out this year that will update the object lesson for the current perilous state of our republic. (Easily found at Amazon – don’t forget to click through the link at the top of the page!)

  15. Ann:

    Hitler was remarkably consistent, I believe. He wrote the original program for the Nazi party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist

    Hitler was more honest than other Leftists, probably because he could be, because his (irrational and loathsome) category of thinking was based on the German people, not on economic “class,” the equally absurd and hate-filled category preferred by his fellow Leftists, the Marxists.

    Hitler loved and adopted the means and methods of Marxism, and most of the “policies”; he just objected to what he described as the racial and non-Germanic aspect of Marxism.

    Islam is the perfect ideological and idiotic system of Marxist and Nazi thought. It is the adoption of One Idea in the service of empowering the followers of a Jerk.

    The paradox is the existential necessity of government.

    Personally, the idea of government repels me. Like suffering, irrationality, hatred, poverty – – government is just a fact of life.

    Personally, can I make my own voluntary associations to address life? I do not know the actual answer. I just know that I can far more than government thinks I can.

    Islam, Marxism, National Socialism – – etc etc – – it’s all about government, coercion, monopoly. What answer does the American Left have, other than prison and punishment? What does the American Left ever propose other than prison and punishment?

    What? Abortion and only abortion. Abortion is the only “freedom” they propose.

    And so the monsters win and win.

    On top of the non-avoidable suffering, more suffering, for the thrill of inflicting suffering. The lovely, euphoric, (empty) thrill of calling racist. Or pointing to a Jew.

  16. Neo, the Klemperer diaries are worth reading, if only for a glimpse of the last Central European bookish professors. He and his Jewish associates knew that people were being killed in local concentration camps, if not knowing the true details of the extermination camps. They were consistently surprised at how long the Nazis held on both before and during the war. Their countrymen seem to have gone along with a combination of patriotism/nationalism that Klemperer shared and a fear of the omnipresent police state. It’s the small injustices and battles that Klemperer has with the Nazis, right up to the end of the war that show this well. His survival depended on a constant careful resistance using the remnants of social respect he had as a WWI veteran and a learned University professor. this shows that the emergence of future progressive tyrants must be fought early, while everyone else is not cowed.

  17. Thanks Neo, I’ll add that first one to my long list of books I want to read (If I can’t die until I’ve read all the books on my want-to-read list I’ll live to be 150 years old!) as it does sounds rather fascinating.

    I’ve read some of Victor Klemperer’s stuff and agree with your recommendation – great stuff!

    Here’s another that, along with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is very good: This is Berlin which is a collection of William Shirer’s broadcast transcriptions. It really cannot be read by itself as it doesn’t tell a complete history; but, it shows how the news from Germany was being heard in the US at that time.

    If I recall correctly, Shirer was the last American Journalist to leave Nazi occupied territory and his broadcasts were getting too censored toward the end. Interestingly, his broadcasts (all taped and many secretly transported through Switzerland) were broadcast in the US with a disclaimer at the beginning to remind listeners that what was being reported wasn’t the whole story as much of the broadcast had to get past the Nazi “censors.” Imagine CNN or some other news organization including such a disclaimer today! Peter Arnett didn’t tell his listening public that Saddam had “minders” following/taking him everywhere until AFTER Saddam’s fall. Instead, Mr. Arnett kept claiming “exclusive” coverage of the “real” story. What hogwash!

    And, that bring me to, Neo, what you say: “I have often thought in recent years that the most important course of all that could be taught and should be required in American schools (but is not) would be “how tyranny takes over.” “

    I couldn’t agree more; but, knowing how far left our higher education is in this country I cannot help but wonder if such a course wouldn’t be used by most educators as a way of promoting partisan left-leaning politics and condemning the Republicans.

    Most of our educators seem hell-bent on left-leaning minders telling us what to think, say, and do – Political correctness, “Hate” speech laws, Obamacare (buy health insurance or pay a fine)

  18. In a parliamentary system, Hitler could act crazy and he would still get a slice of the pie. In the US, if you don’t act ‘electable’ enough for the two mainstream parties, you get nothing except a bill for all that stuff you spend on campaign trips.

  19. To amplify a point Dennis touched on above: It’s impossible to understand the rise of the Nazis without considering the Soviet Union and Communism in general. For 15 years the world had been hearing about oppression, atrocities, and mass deaths caused by the revolution, the civil war, the Polish-Soviet War, and so on. Despite their similar socialist roots and philosophy, the Nazis hated Communists, and for many they seemed like much less of a threat.

    Unfortunately, left-leaning historians downplay or ignore this angle, preferring to portray Nazis as capitalist, racist right-wing conservatives who just happened to appeal to a lot of people.

  20. As I understand the situation, the Communist menace may have fed directly into the anti-Semitism of the German lunatic fringe since a large portion of the original leaders of the Bolsheviks were ethnically Jewish. They were not practicing Jews, but the racist anti-Semites wouldn’t have bothered making that important distinction.

    In Mein Kampf, Hitler talked extensively about the Communist threat and he discussed his own growing anti-Semitism. While Hitler’s demonization of Jews was ugly, there was no call in the book to murder Jews. As Neo said Hitler lied extensively and if he had plans to kill Jews he kept those plans to himself.

    Darwin’s book The Ascent of Man fed directly into German racism since it provided scientific justification for racism and racial conflict. That book deals directly with human evolution and about how less fit individuals and races are replaced by more fit individuals and races. Scientific eugenics was a big deal among intellectuals both in the USA and in Europe at the time. There was an important distinction. The Nazis extended the eugenics from sterilizing the unfit to actually killing them.

    The Nazis began their genocide by attacks on Germans themselves. Before cleansing the race of foreign elements they began by cleansing Germany of the mentally and physically unfit Germans. Disposing of the Jews was just the next logical step. The Nazis justified killed defectives by claiming that their lives were not worth living. (Incidentally from a moral standpoint the left is not much different. They rationalize abortion with very similar arguments. That is why the left hates the fact that Trig Palin exists even though his mother knew that he was a Down’s baby before he was born.)

    There is another important element in the German’s descent into madness which is not often mentioned. Higher Biblical criticism began in German Universities and was very influential. While some of their findings have withstood the test of time, much more has failed. Higher criticism was especially damaging to Protestant Christians who accepted it since for them the Bible had been their infallible moral authority. Destroying the Bible damaged the German’s moral compass and set set them adrift. Higher criticism began with the assumption that origin and evolution of the Bible could be studied just like ordinary literature and surprise, surprise the critics ended up discovering exactly what they had assumed the the Bible is ordinary literature.

    Germany was at one time an intensely religious society.

  21. Looking through a contemporary prism, it’s hard to imagine a time before the ubiquitous presence of world wide news and entertainment, in all its real time immediacy.
    “The Nazis did this in an age where communication was regionally limited. One could say one thing in Bremen and a totally contradictory thing in Munich and each would be old news before the contradiction could have time to be noticed.’
    Just to expand on this comment, what role did mass communication play? Even though radio technology existed fairly early in the century, mass communication was dependent on mass production of the radio. In the USA, the mass production of radios did not occur until the 30s, when “radio ownership went from 1 in 5 homes in, 1931, to 4 in 5 homes, in 1938”, per Wikipedia.
    Barry Mishkind – The Eclectic Engineer: From 1933, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels used the radio as his primary medium (along with the “Wochenschauen” in the cinemas and the centralized press). He introduced the mass production of relative cheap radio sets, the so-called “Volksempfaenger,” so that all Germans had access to radio reception in their homes as well at their working places.”

  22. Dennis: Agreed. Excellent points.
    In reading most of the previous comments, and being one who doesn’t have enough time for much more than Readers Digest Condensed versions, I once again point out, a lot of these points were summarized in Liberal Fascism.

  23. Ymarsakar: “That’s why it takes a totalitarian regime to exploit these things for more power. Most normal governments aren’t thinking quite that far ahead, they just want to solve the temporary security problem, not use it to further increase the fear of the people so that they can produce a coup de tat.”

    That’s an important point.

    These movements have a cancerous aspect which is a big reason they’re tough to first prevent and then defeat.

    Cancer uses the body’s own, necessary functions to take hold and then thrive. To beat cancer, you need to fight your own body, which is self-destructive, because what it uses to live is what you need to live.

    An example is the expanded government surveillance and seizer powers in the USA Patriot Act. The thing is, those anti-liberty measures really are necessary and perhaps not even sufficient to counter the terrorists. The Patriot Act measures were proposed in 1995 by President Clinton in response chiefly to rising al Qaeda and, secondarily, concern about domestic terrorists. Congress watered down Clinton’s 1995 proposed acts over Clinton’s objections to pass the AEDPA of 1996 (PL 104-132), but then later passed Clinton’s 1995 proposed acts when Bush re-proposed them as the USA Patriot Act in response to 9/11.

    Are the measures needed to counter real enemy dangers? Yes. But do they also risk abuse and open the way for exploitation? Also yes.

    Best to have, one, the needed measures, two, wielded by the right people. Two is tougher to ensure than one is to implement.

    In that regard, PapayaSF and others bring up an important contextual point. The Nazis were able to rise because the Communists were a real, urgent, and existential threat. The Germans faced a choice of A or B because C, the Weimer Republic, proved to be too weak. The preferred social choice on principle was simply not competitively robust enough in real terms, ie, the activist game.

    To be fair to the Germans who had to make fundamental life decisions – rational or not – in their social context, they needed C (Weimar Republic) to be strong enough to prevent the competitively robust A (Nazis) and counter competitively robust B (Communists) in the activist game. It’s not unlike the zero-sum competition between (relative) liberals, autocrats, and Islamists in the Middle East in their activist game.

    If we want our preferred C to win out, principle is not enough. The social preference needs to be competitively robust enough in the activist social cultural/political arena to take on and defeat the alternative competitors and dominate.

    Like the Communists that the Nazis counterpointed for the Germans, the social cultural/political alternatives for us are also limited, competitive, and zero-sum. Most Germans preferred C, but C was too weak competitively – C was not activist enough for the activist game versus dedicated activists like the Nazis and Communists.

    The question for us is whether American proponents of our version of C will become activist enough to compete against the dedicated activist alternatives here in the only social cultural/political game there is.

    Because if C is relatively weak in activist terms, no matter how preferable its principles are, then it won’t be socially viable in the face of stronger competitive activists that pragmatically exploit social conditions as they are, like the Nazis did.

  24. Lee Benham: “The Nazi’s were very effective in using propaganda once they came to power. The changed votes in a few weeks.”

    Basic. Narrative contest for the zeitgeist of the activist game.

  25. It should be kept in mind that Hitler and the Nazis never got more than about 37% of the vote. Much of the rest of their rise to power was due to the machinations of Hindenburg’s advisers:

    Hindenburg carped that politics was full of issues such as economics that he did not, and did not want to, understand. He was surrounded, however, by a coterie of advisers antipathetic to the Weimar constitution. These advisers included his son, Oskar, Otto MeiéŸner, General Wilhelm Groener, and General Kurt von Schleicher. This group were known as the Kamarilla. The younger Hindenburg served as his father’s aide-de-camp and controlled politicians’ access to the President.

    Schleicher was a close friend of Oskar and came to enjoy privileged access to Hindenburg. It was he who came up with the idea of Presidential government based on the so-called “25/48/53 formula”. Under a “Presidential” government the head of government (in this case, the chancellor), is responsible to the head of state, and not a legislative body. The “25/48/53 formula” referred to the three articles of the Constitution that could make a “Presidential government” possible:

    –Article 25 allowed the President to dissolve the Reichstag.
    –Article 48 allowed the President to sign into law emergency bills without the consent of the Reichstag. However, the Reichstag could cancel any law passed by Article 48 by a simple majority within sixty days of its passage.
    –Article 53 allowed the President to appoint the Chancellor.

    Schleicher’s idea was to have Hindenburg appoint a man of Schleicher’s choosing as chancellor, who would rule under the provisions of Article 48. If the Reichstag should threaten to annul any laws so passed, Hindenburg could counter with the threat of dissolution. Hindenburg was unenthusiastic about these plans, but was pressured into going along with them by his son along with MeiéŸner, Groener and Schleicher.

    Much more on their wheelings & dealings that brought Hitler to power here.

  26. William Shirer (Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) witnessed the rise of the Nazi regime. One thing that astonished him was how easily so many Communists became Nazis. They are, of course, slightly heretical versions of the same evil political philosophy.

    The Left likes to portray them as poles apart, but that is nonsense. When Hitler and Stalin began the wars as allies attacking Poland, the Progressives in America were frantic in their demands that America not support Great Britain in its titanic battle against Germany. That changed overnight when Hitler began Operation Barbarossa and attacked Russia.

    At their black, rotten cores, Fascists, Progressives, Nazis, and Communists are essentially the same.

  27. so much of what I’ve read focuses on the uniqueness of the German people: their unique racism, or rage, or obedience to authority, or attraction to demagogues, or militarism, or any number of other bad characteristics they exhibited.

    This is referred to by historians as the “Sonderweg” – a thesis arguing that Germany, for a variety of reasons, was inevitably going to produce Nazism or something similar. It dominated the postwar scholarship for decades but it doesn’t have much support among academics anymore. Authors of popular histories, however, have yet to catch up.

    But at this point it seems to me it would be far more instructive to study the German people’s relative ordinariness

    Scholarship for the past fifteen years at least has tended to do just that. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men is a good example.

  28. Rachelle…”how easily many communists became Nazis”

    In 1933/1934, 18-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor walked across Europe, from Holland to Turkey. While in Germany, he was invited to stay overnight at the home of a young working-class man, and noticed Nazi regalia everywhere, and an SA uniform hanging neatly ironed. When Paddy said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, the man laughed and sat down on his bed and said: “Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers and sickles, pictures or Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World, Unite!” He went on to say that he and his friends “We used to beat hell out of the Nazis, and they beat the hell out of us…Then suddenly, when Hitler came into power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me!” His old friends had all changed sides as well; the only problem he saw was that there were hardly and socialists or communists left to beat up. His parents did not share his enthusiasm, he said; they were “old-fashioned,” with his father still talking about the greatness of Bismarck and the Kaiser and Hindenburg and his mother focused only on the church.

    http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/45701.html

  29. Ann:

    Hindenburg hated and feared Hitler but unwisely thought he could be controlled. He greatly underestimated his ability to weasel out of all such restrictions. Hindenburg kept devising arrangements he thought would contain him, but Hindenburg did not understand how audacious Hitler would be, and how clever:

    One of the men who had supported Hitler’s 1923 Munich putsch was Hindenburg’s former boss, General Paul von Ludendorff. On hearing news of Hitler’s appointment, Ludendorff telegrammed Hindenburg, telling the president “…you have handed over our Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time … Future generations will curse you in your grave for this action”. The man instrumental in Hitler’s appointment, von Papen, remained cocky about his ability to control the new chancellor. “In two months time we will have squeezed Hitler into a corner until he squeaks”, von Papen told a confidante. He could not have been more wrong. Within two months Hitler had seized almost all political power in Germany, dismembering the state, disempowering the Reichstag and consigning Weimar democracy to the wasteland of history.

    By the way, that spot-on quote about Hitler doesn’t mean that Ludendorff (whose first name was Erich, not Paul, by the way) wasn’t somewhat of a nutcase himself. Here’s some info on him:

    In his later years, Ludendorff became a pacifist and went into a relative seclusion with his second wife, Mathilde von Kemnitz (1877—1966), writing several books and leading the Tannenbergbund. He concluded that the world’s problems were the result of Christians (especially the Jesuits and Catholics), Jews, and Freemasons. Together with Mathilde, he founded the Bund fé¼r Gotteserkenntnis (Society for the Knowledge of God), a small and rather obscure esoterical society of Theists that survives to this day.

    By the time Hitler came to power, however, Ludendorff was no longer sympathetic to him, the Nazis having distanced themselves from his increasingly eccentric conspiracy theories. In January 1933, on the occasion of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor by President Hindenburg, Ludendorff told him, “I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done.” In an attempt to regain Ludendorff’s favor, Hitler paid Ludendorff an unannounced visit to his home on Ludendorff’s 70th birthday in 1935 and offered to make him a field marshal if he came out of retirement and back into politics with the Nazi party. Infuriated, Ludendorff allegedly told Hitler, “A field marshal is born, not made!” Ludendorff died at his home in Tutzing on 20 December 1937 at age 72. He was given–against his explicit wishes–a state funeral organized and attended by Hitler, who declined to speak at his eulogy.

  30. I have often thought in recent years that the most important course of all that could be taught and should be required in American schools (but is not) would be “how tyranny takes over.”

    Oh, but it was taught! Have you not read about the Third Wave experiment in a history class in Palo Alto in 1967? It’s very chilling.

  31. snopercod:

    That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about, although that has some value, too.

    I’m talking about a more conventionally didactic history course that studies many tyrannies in history, particularly the history of the West but it could included other cultures. It would describe step by step how it was done in each case, how the people were either convinced or tricked, and what to watch out for.

    For example, just to take a very simple example, watch out for a cult of personality.

  32. Hindenburg also didn’t realize what self-serving men two of his closest advisers, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, were. This does not make for edifying reading:

    When the Reichstag convened in September 1932, its only act was to pass a massive vote of no-confidence in Papen’s government. In response, Papen had Hindenburg dissolve the Reichstag for elections in November 1932. The second Reichstag elections saw the Nazi vote drop from 37 percent to 32 percent, though the Nazis once again remained the largest party in the Reichstag. After the November elections, there ensued another round of fruitless talks between Hindenburg, Papen, Schleicher on the one hand and Hitler and the other Nazi leaders on the other.

    The President and the Chancellor wanted Nazi support for the “Government of the President’s Friends”; at most they were prepared to offer Hitler the meaningless office of Vice-Chancellor. On 24 November 1932, during the course of another Hitler-Hindenburg meeting, Hindenburg stated his fears that “a presidential cabinet led by Hitler would necessarily develop into a party dictatorship with all its consequences for an extreme aggravation of the conflicts within the German people”.

    Hitler, for his part, remained adamant that Hindenburg give him the Chancellorship and nothing else. These demands were incompatible and unacceptable to both sides and the political stalemate continued. To break the stalemate, Papen proposed that Hindenburg declare martial law and do away with democracy, effecting a presidential coup. Papen won over Hindenburg’s son Oskar with this idea, and the two persuaded Hindenburg for once to forgo his oath to the Constitution and to go along with this plan. Schleicher, who had come to see Papen as a threat, blocked the martial law move by unveiling the results of a war games exercise that showed if martial law was declared, the Nazi SA and the Communist Red Front Fighters would rise up, the Poles would invade, and the Reichswehr would be unable to cope.

    Whether this was the honest result of a war games exercise or just a fabrication by Schleicher to force Papen out of office is a matter of some historical debate. The opinion of most leans towards the latter, for in January 1933 Schleicher would tell Hindenburg that new war games had shown the Reichswehr would crush both the SA and the Red Front Fighters and defend the eastern borders of Germany from a Polish invasion. The results of the war games forced Papen to resign in December 1932 in favor of Schleicher. Hindenburg was most upset at losing his favorite Chancellor, and suspecting that the war games were faked to force Papen out, came to bear a grudge against Schleicher.

    Papen, for his part, was determined to get back into office, and on 4 January 1933 he met Hitler to discuss how they could bring down Schleicher’s government, though the talks were inconclusive largely because Papen and Hitler each coveted the Chancellorship for himself. However, Papen and Hitler agreed to keep talking. Ultimately, Papen came to believe that he could control Hitler from behind the scenes and decided to support him as the new Chancellor. Papen then persuaded Meissner and the younger Hindenburg of the merits of his plan, and the three then spent the second half of January pressuring Hindenburg into naming Hitler as Chancellor. Hindenburg was most loath to consider Hitler as Chancellor and preferred that Papen hold that office instead.

    However, the pressure from Meissner, Papen, and the younger Hindenburg was relentless, and by the end of January the President had decided to appoint Hitler Chancellor. After Schleicher as well had despaired of his efforts to get hold of the situation, he accepted his resignation, with the words: “Thanks, General, for everything you have done for the Fatherland. Now let’s have a look at which way, with God’s help, the cat will keep on jumping.” Hitler threatened Hindenburg to make him chancellor or to make him leader of Reichstag. Finally, the 84-year-old Hindenburg agreed to make Hitler Chancellor, and on the morning of 30 January 1933, Hindenburg swore him in as Chancellor at the Presidential Palace.

    What struck me the most in all that was that the Nazis got 5% fewer votes than they’d gotten in the first Reichstag elections that year. Voters having second thoughts, or just a lack of interest? Wonder what, if anything, that drop in votes signified to Papen and Schleicher, or if they were simply interested in their own power plays.

  33. I have often thought in recent years that the most important course of all that could be taught and should be required in American schools (but is not) would be “how tyranny takes over.”

    Seems to me most of the people that one would expect to teach such a course are likely to be part of the effort.

    I’m sure they’re fully aware that teaching students to recognize what they’re trying to do might not be a good idea…

  34. “The pressure I am under is greater than in the war, and for the first time in my life I feel political hatred for a group (as I did not during the war), a deadly hatred. In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.”…

    This is precisely what I felt when I was forced into the abattoir of “Obamacare” against my will. We are being enslaved, step by irreversible step. And I hate them for that. For the first time in my life, I feel no loyalty to “our” government, only bitter contempt.

  35. Another excellent book on this subject: “Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy” by Eric Metaxas. It’s about the life of a world class theologian who hailed from an astonishingly elite German family, from his youth during WWI to his eventual imprisonment and death by the Nazis as a result of his involvement with the resistance. Much of it chronicles the Nazi rise to power through the eyes of an incredibly bright and articulate man with acute moral clarity. It examines the spiritual/human failings of a people on an individual, cultural and political level; the lies, delusions, willful blindness, foolishness, cruelty, bigotry, absurd politics, manipulation, ruthless will to power and inevitable demise. The past as prologue.

  36. When I was growing up they made us read 1984, Lord of the Flies and Animal Farm.

    Ask almost any high school student today about these books and watch the blank expression….

  37. Ludendorff was Hindenburg’s second during the first World War- his nickname was General “Was sagt’s du?”; owing to the fact that every time someone asked Hindenburg a question he’d turn and say “Nah- Ludendorff, was sagt’s du?”

  38. Teaching a course in tyranny in today’s leftist dominated academia would probably run from Mussolini through Bush. Somehow, Lenin, Mao and Castro wouldn’t get included.
    The original “Nazi Seizure” I read in college 40 years ago didn’t include the real name of the town. The town was Northeim, about 20 miles north of Gottinggen.

  39. I read an Eric Larson book a few years ago called In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. It was about the American ambassador an his daughter in Berlin right before WWII and was a pretty good read. It’s not a deep history book but it’s a different perspective then you usually see.

    Another I enjoyed was “when money dies” about the inflation post wwi.

  40. What you reference in “Nazi Seizure” about normal persons’ abandonment of civil society during the early post-1933 years, and the reason for it, rings true. My wife is a Brazilian of German descent. As young men in 1935, her father and her mother’s two brothers were recruited to go to Germany from Brazil. They worked for a year in Party construction battalions, but when their year was up they all opted to return to Brazil rather than join the German army. They not only found the propaganda oppressive, but the lower level officials to be in general personally obnoxious.

  41. Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer is a very detailed work, more than 500 pages. It is the story of remarkable spiritual orientation developing at a young age, culminating in a Christ-like self-sacrifice against the forces of evil.

    “When Money Dies” is not enjoyable; it is scary. But it is eminently readable, a very important explanation of the monstrous, intentionally-started German inflation of 1922-23, which birthed the social chaos that enabled the Nazi rise. There is much to be learned from this book. I have given away multiple copies as eye-openers. Most members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee have probably not read it.

    Knowledge of post-WWI German history and its cast of characters will help in reading both.

  42. Scott@227am:
    I read it all. The 4th paragraph is about the success of the Gramscian way in turning vulnerable people into members of organized amoral mob in which they do things they might otherwise only briefly think about. And the opposition. But it doesn’t adequately address the in-between, the fabled independent American who is sometimes left and sometimes not.

  43. ““When Money Dies” is not enjoyable; it is scary.”

    Well yes that is true too. Terrifying stuff! But I enjoyed it in that I felt it added to my knowledge of what was actually going on by focusing on a period of time and a subject that often gets skipped.

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