Okay, I”m going to defend Margaret Brennan of CBS just a teeny tiny little bit
Very teeny and very tiny.
You may have already heard the story of the folly of CBS’s Margaret Brennan. It occurred during an interview with Marco Rubio, in which Rubio defended J. D. Vance’s Munich speech in which Vance had criticized the current anti-free-speech policies of much of Europe. Brennan “interrupted Rubio with the claim that Vance was ‘standing in a country [Germany] where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.'”
She must have thought she had him there. Obviously, she did not, and the criticism of Brennan came fast and furious, not just from Rubio but from the right in general:
“I have to disagree with you,” [Rubio] responded. “Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities … There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were the sole and only party that governed that country, and so that’s not an accurate reflection of history.”
The ignorance and arrogance of most people in the news business doesn’t surprise me anymore. It’s gotten them far, after all. And yes, Brennan said something really stupid. The Nazis’ genocide of the Jews was committed when there was no free speech in Germany, so she was correctly excoriated for that statement.
But what if she really had meant that the rise of the Nazis was helped along by free speech in Weimar Germany? I have no idea whether Brennan even knows what the Weimar Republic was, but let’s imagine that she does, and that what she really meant was that maybe if the Nazis had been suppressed much earlier, they couldn’t have gotten as far as they did. That would be a very basic example of an argument sometimes made against freedom of speech, which it that it sometimes allow evil to triumph.
Of course, that’s an argument available to evildoers as well – that it’s they who are clamping down on the real evildoers.
Libertarians and classical liberals – and I count myself among the latter – believe that the best remedy for bad speech is to counter that speech with better arguments and better performance in the real world. But we all know that doesn’t always work, and that a lie can often get halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its boots on. But allowing free speech is still better than not allowing free speech.
What’s more, did the Weimar Republic even have free speech? Well, on paper they did because it was protected in their constitution, but in reality they didn’t, as FIRE (an organization devoted to free speech principles) explains:
Richard Delgado, an early champion of speech codes and now more famous as a founding scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory, cites the Rwandan genocide … along with Weimar Germany, as cautionary tales against free-speech purism. The problem is that neither historical precedent supports the idea that speech restraints could have prevented a genocide.
As I [Lukianoff] explained in my review of Eric Berkowitz’s excellent book, “Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News,” Weimar Germany had laws banning hateful speech (particularly hateful speech directed at Jews), and top Nazis including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher actually were sentenced to prison time for violating them. The efforts of the Weimar Republic to suppress the speech of the Nazis are so well known in academic circles that one professor has described the idea that speech restrictions would have stopped the Nazis as “the Weimar Fallacy.”
A 1922 law passed in response to violent political agitators such as the Nazis permitted Weimar authorities to censor press criticism of the government and advocacy of violence. This was followed by a number of emergency decrees expanding the power to censor newspapers. The Weimar Republic not only shut down hundreds of Nazi newspapers — in a two-year period, they shut down 99 in Prussia alone — but they accelerated that crackdown on speech as the Nazis ascended to power. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 until 1927.
In [a] 1920s cartoon by Philipp Rupprecht, Hitler is depicted as having his mouth sealed with tape that reads “forbidden to speak.” The text beneath this image reads, “He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany.”
Far from being an impediment to the spread of National Socialist ideology, Hitler and the Nazis used the attempts to suppress their speech as public relations coups.
And of course, when the Nazis were in power, they were able to use the Weimar anti-free-speech precedent against the Nazis’ own opponents:
The laws mentioned earlier that allowed Weimar authorities to shut down newspapers, and additional laws intended to limit the spread of Nazi ideology via the radio, had their reins turned over to the Nazi party when Hitler became chancellor. Predictably, the Nazis used these preexisting means of censorship to crush any political speech opposing them, allowing for an absolute grip on the country that would have been much more difficult or impossible with strong legal protections for press and speech.
I actually think that, even without those Weimar speech-suppression laws, the Nazis would have managed just as easily to clamp down on the opposition. They did it through violence and threats of violence, through the declaration of emergency powers (allowed by the German constitution), and ultimately by the fact that Hitler manipulated the Reichstag into dissolving itself, making him a complete dictator.
However, I like that phrase “the Weimar Fallacy.” The nicest thing I can say about Brennan is that she may indeed suffer from it.
Weimar’s failure wasn’t failure to suppress free speech: it was failure to suppress outright violence and intimidation–by Nazis and Communists both. That would have done the trick.
DAVID FOSTER:
But didn’t they do at least some of that? For example, Hitler was imprisoned, although he didn’t serve most of his sentence. How long is long enough? And how many would have to be imprisoned, for how long? And then wouldn’t they have become martyrs?
I’m not disagreeing with you entirely by any means. I just don’t know if it would have helped. What would really have helped is if the leaders of Germany, like Hindenburg, had realized how dangerous and how wily Hitler really was, and they hadn’t ultimately cooperated in his rise.
CBS, not ABC, though if there’s a difference I can’t name it.
sdferr:
Fixed.
You know what’s funny? I originally had CBS, and I saw some article that said ABC so I changed it without confirming. That’ll teach me.
I also find little to no difference.
Do the commenteriat believe that the Weimar Republic suppressing free speech would have eliminated the Far Left Spartacist Uprising in 1919 and the 1923 Hamburg Uprising?
It wasn’t just the National Socialists who despised and wanted to overthrow the Weimar Republic. The Marxist-Leninist Left wanted to do so, too, and by the early 1920s had financial support from the USSR in their attempts to do so.
There weren’t a lot of Eagle Scouts in post-WWI German politics on any side of the political equation.
The German court system was absurdly lenient with Hitler and Gen. Ludendorff.
==
Here’s a suggestion for Dingbat Brennan: the Nazis had a constituency because successive fractions of the German establishment had managed to discredit themselves over the period running from 1914 to 1930 by making a dog’s breakfast of every notable thing on which they put their hands. Three suggestions might help any ministry avoid this: (1) don’t print money to finance the government’s obligations and be prudent and selective about the obligations to which you elect to subscribe and (2) when there is an abrupt increase in the demand for real balances, devalue the currency, increase the size of the monetary base, and satisfy that demand and (3) have structures in place to contain bank runs.
Thought you said you were a Conservative? Maybe they’re the same to political people…?
Anyway, I watched that segment…seems like she was choking on some words—some maybe because she was getting instructions on what to say from her ear plug. Seemed like she was trying to follow Rubio ‘n someone in her ear, and the topic was confusing to her…
Karmi:
Classical liberals are indeed pretty much conservatives with a somewhat libertarian bent.
Such definitions are rarely exact, though.
Thanks!
This is indeed the right way to tackle the Brennan/MSM ‘zinger’ line, and of those that I’ve read so far, neo, you’re the only commentator to bring it up. Thank you. (And it fills in a bit of a gap in my knowledge of the Weimar regime, too.)
It had been fairly clear to me that Ms. Brennan was indeed trying to suggest the incitements and hatred which antedated the Nazi ascendancy. She may have done so in a somewhat clumsy way, but it disappointed me that Rubio didn’t pick up on this. His counterplay of slapping down the more surface-level connection was not nothing, and maybe he wouldn’t have been quite prepared to go into the whole Weimar-era aspect that you lay out above, but still, I felt he didn’t get to the real meat of it. He essentially scored an easy lay-up, but the three-pointer was there for the taking.
Still, Brennan, if she believed the Weimar Fallacy, was accepting hearsay history without investigation. She ought not to use unsubstantiated theories in a “gotcha” attempt to discredit the U.S. Vice President.
Philip Sells – Yesterday was the first time I’ve ever heard anyone so much as suggest that Hitler “weaponized free speech” to conduct a genocide. Stunned, gape-jawed silence would be a perfectly natural reaction to such a totally bonkers assertion.
I give Rubio credit for having the wherewithal to make a forceful and cogent response in real time. I’m not inclined to nitpick details. I have little doubt that he could have done better with a little forewarning.
Furthermore the default action because of stalins campaign against the social democrats would have left the communists in charge the other party with a militia
Of course brennan was silent over the ‘mostly peaceful protests’ that laid waste to 50 cities the violence against civilians from magdeberg to munich, also in the uk stockport france most recently vienna because the oppressed class are involved
Neo…the Weimar government did take some actions against Nazi illegal behavior, but it seems to have been pretty lame. According to Sebastian Haffner (from my review)
Haffner makes it clear that the beasts gained power from the reluctance of the authorities to deal with them severely. For example, Hitler openly threatened and insulted the judge of the highest German court, before which he had been summoned as a witness. There was no charge of contempt. Nothing happened.
“It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that of the other: the savage impudence which gradually made it possible for the unpleasant, little apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what he was up to…then also the hypnotic trance into which his public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of depravity and the ecstasy of evil.”
Just put up a post at X in reaction to the attack on free speech by the German government and the approval of that attack by CBS News:
https://x.com/DavidF1344/status/1891647415469408593
Pea brained talking heads seem to be par for the course. How dare anyone expect better?
I generally think the commenters on this site are among the most readable, as good or better than most other sites I visit. However, I’m hoping Victor Davis Hansen will write a column about free speech and the rise of Nazism for the definitive take. He seems to have quite a grasp on WWII history and has an enjoyable way of describing it. He also has the ability to provide talking points effortlessly. I await patiently, VDH.
Neo,
One clarification: Hitler was not imprisoned for his speech. He was imprisoned for his role in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which he and others tried to seize the German government.
Jeff Cox:
I’m aware of that.
But there were other restrictions of Nazi speech, as mentioned in the quote in the post.
Brennan’s ridiculous comment exemplifies my long held belief about journalists. My personal experience with them is limited (and certainly not with anyone at the national level, like her) but not negligible.
There’s a an old expression about a person’s knowledge being a mile wide and an inch deep. With journalists, I’d say it’s often ten miles wide but a centimeter deep. Over the course of their careers, they often develop a broad base of very general knowledge of a wide array of topics. If they’re good at their job, they can also write/speak in a way that conveys confidence and erudition on most of these topics (at least to laymen). But if challenged, and pressed to explain themselves in detail (which they rarely are), they can easily go blank. Good journalists are aware of this limitation and will acknowledge it to their interlocutor, asking the latter to provide more details on whatever subject(s) on which he has expertise. Bad ones will just double and triple down.
The Gell Mann amnesia effect is most apt here.
I agree that Brennan was likely referring to Weimar. The common knowledge most of us remember from high school or college was that Weimar was a liberal, tolerant and open society, which was plagued by economic turmoil and hyperinflation and that this was exploited by the Nazis. All of the above is partially true, but it is far from a complete picture. Based an the above superficial knowledge, Brennan assumed Weimar had broad free speech protections, which allowed the Nazis free reign to ultimately seize power. Not true, which a little simple research would have uncovered.
Small addendum to my previous: Spiked has a commentary here along the same lines, citing some of the same facts as our hostess along the way. So that’s two.
Bauxite, I agree that hers was one of the more deranged interpretations of the NS period that one is ever likely to see.
Argh! So my P. S. to Bauxite did save after all. Annoying.
Well, anyway, if nothing else – and I’m not sure of the larger context of Brennan’s argument – it shows that it’s clearly reached a point at which the legacy media feel that truly free speech is too dangerous to be permitted, and in this, they’re certainly converging openly with the view of the western European establishment. It all goes to show that the left in this country would like to essentially turn America into a transoceanic version of (western) Europe in many ways.
I wondered the same thing as neo’s thoughts expressed early in this post. The answer is nicely elucidated.
I’ve read that the Weimar laws regulating personal firearms made it easy for the Nazis to confiscate them. All firearms had to be itemized and registered, annually, I believe. So the Nazis just went down the existing lists.
TommyJay:
I’ve read the same thing about the use of the Weimar gun registry by the Nazis.
Probably a lot of us have read Burleigh on the Third Reich, and his first chapter is on Weimar and how its many dysfunctions made things easier for the Nazi Party to take it over. Free speech, if it be a weakness, was not a Weimar weakness. Emergency decrees were frequently used to shut down speakers and newspapers, including Nazi speakers and newspapers.
Journalists rarely know any facts as such. What they know is narrative. Their ideas about Weimar are probably based on watching Cabaret.
Probably a lot of us have read Burleigh on the Third Reich, and his first chapter is on Weimar and how its many dysfunctions made things easier for the Nazi Party to take it over.
==
As late as 1928, the Nazi Party could not command more than 3% of the vote. The 1929 economic shock and the Bruening ministry’s response manufactured a constituency for the Nazis and expanded that for the Communist Party. Another factor was that the Presidency was held by the superlatively unsuitable Gen. v. Hindenburg, who in his dotage was manipulable by schemers like v. Papen and v. Schleicher.
@ Niketas > “Their ideas about Weimar are probably based on watching Cabaret.”
Great show.
I liked it better 50 years ago (1972!!) before I learned more about history and other things, but I re-watched the video recently and it’s still a great show.
I suspect that a LOT of people get their ideas about history, and sometimes biography, from watching movies and TV, with books of fiction being the primary source for earlier generations; which is why I get upset when the authors/directors get basic facts wrong (sometimes on purpose).
Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a purported “authentic” work and one of self-proclaimed “alternative history.”
Interpretation of the facts is another kettle of lobsters altogether, but I prefer to start on some kind of common ground.
@ chazzand > “I generally think the commenters on this site are among the most readable, as good or better than most other sites I visit”
Agreed.
I usually cruise through the comments at Legal Insurrection and Sarah Hoyt’s blog, and sometimes Red State (mostly to see if anyone agrees with me!), but Neo’s board is my major news aggregator, because you just can’t read everything everyday (I try, I try!) and it helps when people I “know” link something they see as important (or even just entertaining – thanks!).
The personal knowledge some of you have about the topics is especially useful.
Because the journalists have none.
Ben Rhodes was correct about that.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/white-house-aide-ben-rhodes-cleans-up-his-mess-222951
Can you imagine today’s Politico amplifying a NYT Magazine article because they criticized a Democrat operative, even if it was to diss the post? Of course, in 2016, the Left was still assuming Hillary was going to be the next president, so maybe it was inside-the-tent shivving.
And, did you know Rhodes now writes for the New York Times?
Does he consider himself to be like those journalists he manipulated for Obama?
Probably not; he’s sooooo much smarter than they were.
Or has he finally realized that they were willing participants in the polititheater?
https://www.nytimes.com › 2025 › 02 › 09 › opinion › donald-trump-foreign-policy.html
Opinion | This Isn’t the Donald Trump America Elected
Feb 9, 2025 Ben Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “After the Fall: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the World We’ve Made.”
All I got was the headline, because of the paywall.
I wonder who Rhodes blames for the rise of authoritarianism.
Probably not Obama, or Biden Inc.
And (sight unseen) this most definitely IS the Trump America elected.
Check out PowerLine blog’s The Week in Pictures from last Friday.
@ David > “Weimar’s failure wasn’t failure to suppress free speech: it was failure to suppress outright violence and intimidation–by Nazis and Communists both. That would have done the trick.” and “Haffner makes it clear that the beasts gained power from the reluctance of the authorities to deal with them severely. For example, Hitler openly threatened and insulted the judge of the highest German court, before which he had been summoned as a witness. There was no charge of contempt. Nothing happened.”
A good example of the difference between just prosecutions and lawfare: the first is necessary for social order and national survival; the second destroys both.
Andy McCarthy to the contrary notwithstanding.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5148465-fox-analyst-andy-mccarthy-blasts-trump-doj-for-weaponization-in-column/
For a good example of actual, knowlegable journalists, and classical liberals, I have been much impressed by Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, who have a weekly podcast discussion about current events AND some pertinent short story, usually from the classical oeuvre of well-known authors (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are frequently seen, but so is Mark Twain).
This week’s episode featured one of Walter’s own stories, which I enjoyed.
He claims that it is his first foray into Science Fiction, and he did quite well.
I read a few other posts on his Substack and liked them all.
(There are a few typos, but they’re free!)
https://www.racket.news/p/transcript-america-this-week-feb-8df
https://kirn.substack.com/p/angel-fire
This is a personal anecdote, but it “reads” like a short story.
https://kirn.substack.com/p/american-lunch
Side note: I have set aside four boxes of books, collected over many years, about German history, particularly WWII and the rise of National Socialism.
I enjoyed the early ones, regarding Prussia, Bismarck, the unification of the German princedoms, and WWI.
I needed the later ones, because it was inexplicable to me (and many others, I came to realize) how such an educated, urbane, literate, Christian country — the home of Mozart and Beethoven and all those musicians! — became the locus of radical racism and vicious genocide.
Since 2009 I have begun to understand.
I think it’s important to look at this excerpt from the FIRE article at Neo’s link.
It’s a reply to Lukianoff’s arguments (which she cited) by a past-president of the ACLU, apparently when they still walked their talk on liberty.
Nadine Strossen:
I’m sure it will surprise everyone here that the Party NOT punishing political violence over the last 8 or more years is NOT the current administration.
Justice is not vengeance when predicated on actual criminal acts.
Hitler got a light sentence in a Bavarian court after the Bierhallputsch because his co-conspirators were the Dictator of Bavaria, the head of the remnants of the Bavarian Army, and the head of the Bavarian state police. Their plan was to march on Berlin and provoke a preference cascade similar to Mussolini in 1922 or Napoleon in 1815, leading to an Army coup d’etat. Hitler’s job was to line up street muscle. He became impatient when his co-conspirators were stymied by the Army chief of staff in Berlin, who wanted no part in a coup that would provoke immediate war with France. Hitler “arrested” the triumvirate during a speech and threatened to shoot them if they didn’t immediately proclaim a “National Revolution.” So it was an insurrection within an insurrection.
The argument could be made that the attempt to suppress Nazi speech actually strengthened them.
I think it’s human nature: when the authorities (especially unpopular authorities) try to suppress something, the implication is that they have something to hide or that they fear what they’re trying to suppress. The natural reaction of many is to question: what are they trying to hide and/or what do they fear? and seek out more information about it.
Trump’s story speaks of this as well. The harder they tried to shut him down the more firmly entrenched his popularity became. The public came to see him as an underdog…oppressed and persecuted…and responded by supporting him.
Call it an offshoot of the Streisand effect. The harder an unpopular government tries to keep someone down, the more public support they get.
The dems would likely have been much better served to just ignore Trump after he left office. Dismiss him as inconsequential. Their going after him with such gusto and from so many different angles kept him in the public consciousness and only increased his popularity.
Leo Strauss, Feb. 26, 1941 — Lecture given to the General Seminar of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research, New York: German Nihilism
AesopFan:
Elections have consequences?
Fundamental trasmogrifaction.
We have and are living it.
To mix metaphors:
You may not be interested in politics, but the PARTY (D) is interested in you.
Even interested in a NPA.
The negative premise logical fallacy. Can she abort the baby, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon, and have her, too? Time will tell if we can mitigate its progress.
Because the point of the exercise was to crush all political opposition or at least any effective one someone like a paul ryan or a mcconnell can stay
Thats why the maginot line around the capitol bureau agents in the school board meetings an attempted purge of the military mass deplatforming arresting imprisoning or attempted bankruptcy of the opposition counsel
all things that seem fantastic to those who were not aware nor put in proper persoective
AesopFan @ 1:35am,
There’s the old joke, “Only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German.” You got Beethoven right, but Mozart was Austrian.
neo,
I interpreted Brennan the same way you did, but that made her statement no less idiotic, in my mind. What heinous historical human act was not predated by speech, at some level? It’s akin to saying, “Hitler breathed in oxygen and expelled carbon dioxide, therefore allowing humans to freely respirate those gases has the potential to lead to genocide.” Yes, I suppose, technically that is true, but it is also an idiotic association.
Free speech is also a precursor and component of most all that is great in human history.
What Brennan and so many elites do not like is we humans recognizing their “diversity is our strength” is not working, vis a vis mass, unchecked immigration. And they don’t want us to be able to talk about the failures. MAGA, AfD, Brexit/Reform UK… The Netherlands, Italy, France, Hungary, Poland…
Immigration can work well under proper and specific circumstances, but for decades most Western leaders have not wanted open discourse about the challenges. This is the “free speech” Brennan fears.
provoke a preference cascade similar to Mussolini in 1922
==
Mussolini did not land in the Prime Minister’s chair consequent to a preference cascade. It was a discretionary decision of the King’s. The House of Savoy got their comeuppance in 1946 when the monarchy was eliminated and they were exiled.
Hitler got a light sentence in a Bavarian court after the Bierhallputsch because his co-conspirators were the Dictator of Bavaria, the head of the remnants of the Bavarian Army, and the head of the Bavarian state police.
==
Don’t think so.
==
https://spartacus-educational.com/GERkahr.htm
There are many good points made here, but one that applies to Germany (and Japan) has not shown up – a historically ingrained sense of racial superiority, including the unquestioned justification of violence against the other when necessary, or convenient.
Like many here, I was told in high school and college the simplistic story that the Germans were basically good people, with egalitarian tendencies just like us, but traumatized by the Treaty of Versailles and subsequently victimized by Hitler.
Later I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by Shirer and was disabused of this by the ample evidence he presented that Germany was more than ripe for Hitler, in ways we would find hard to grasp. I do not recall that Shirer made this case explicitly, as much as it simply emerges from his account of his contemporaneous life experience as an American journalist (for the BBC) in Berlin.
I can only surmise that a major reason that the U.S. has not succumbed to this lust for authoritarianism and domination (although many will of course claim it indeed has) is that it was formed largely from a cohort that had self-selected away from it, by emigration from Europe.
If you haven’t read Rise & Fall (or haven’t reread it as an older adult) please consider doing so!
Important to stress that since for the Left Trump is Hitler (and his supporters Nazis), anything and everything that Trump supports, e.g., Free Speech, fiscal accountability, government transparency (NOT in the DPUSA sense), fair elections—honesty itself—and Executive decision-making MUST be filtered (i.e., “explained” AND shredded) through the distorting lens of their ultra-perverse Narrative, IOW their uber-twisted, mega-destructive reality…
(It’s a MORAL IMPERATIVE…to enable them to get back on track; back on the road to achieving TOTAL POWER, which is their —toxic—definition of “Democracy”, the pursuit of which JUSTIFIES DIINF ABD SAYING EVERYTHING ABD ANYTHING.
Oops, should be “…JUSTIFIES DOING AND SAYING EVERYTHING AND ANYTHING”.
For example:
“DOGE Says $4.7 Trillion in Treasury Payments Missing Identification Codes;
“The payments for unknown items make government spending almost impossible to track, according to the agency.”—
https://lists.theepochtimes.com/links/54sLuEttXw/HhryKHE6n/Ag2ZT8kzDM52/d1U7xAz3s
…for example:
“DOGE Finds $4.7 Trillion In Virtually Untraceable Treasury Payments”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/doge-finds-47-trillion-virtually-untraceable-treasury-payments
When I think about the vile Brennan, I can’t help recalling Sally Field in “ Not Without my Daughter “
Related—the sordid, outrageous story of Ilya Shapiro and Georgetown University…
…explaining why Free Speech (for the wrong kinds of people) MUST be MALIGNED and ultimately SUPPRESSED:
“How Did Law Schools Become Lawless?”—
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/how-did-the-law-schools-become-lawless/
H/T Powerline blog.
File under: Free speech** for me but for thee.
** AND VIOLENCE
+ Bonus
“ONE THING YOU CAN SAY ABOUT CBS NEWS”—
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/02/one-thing-you-can-say-about-cbs-news.php
IOW utter corruption. Utter dishonesty (OK, four words…)
– – – – – – –
Sorry about the double posting, above seems to be caused by long delays in the comment upload sequence.
“ Important to stress that since for the Left Trump is Hitler (and his supporters Nazis), anything and everything that Trump supports,“
And yet the few remaining survivors and their families overwhelmingly support Trump,
And those who would be selected by Germans to collaborate oppose Trump
Later I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by Shirer and was disabused of this by the ample evidence he presented that Germany was more than ripe for Hitler, in ways we would find hard to grasp.
==
It’s not that hard to grasp. The German establishment lost the war. The war incorporated domestic hardships of a sort the Allied powers did not see because they were not blockaded. It also included a large death toll. The result of the peace treaties was contrived humiliation. Then, after the war, the ministries of the day trashed the currency in an effort to provide financial support to striking workers in the Rhineland. Then you had the Depression and the Bruening ministry’s non-response to it. The only elements of the German political spectrum not implicated in these disasters were the volkisch / revanchist element and the Communist Party. Elsewhere you had political leadership which was more capable and less malevolent. You also had better institutions.
==
Please recall the volkisch element in the German electorate did not amount to more than about 2% of the whole during the period running from 1890 to 1918 and did not amount to more than about 3% during the period running from 1918 to 1929 (though you could argue that much of it was not manifest as it was operating through the National People’s Party). That sort of thing has not been a feature of note in German political life since 1949.
re the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923:
The history is complicated. We naturally focus on the role of Hitler, as he was a driving character and the trial and his subsequent best-seller made him a Nationalist hero, celebrity, and symbol of resistance to the Versailles settlement and all it entailed. At the time, Hitler was one leader of the Kampfbund, an alliance of paramilitary groups.
A broader perspective includes the entire Revolutionary autumn of 1923, the struggle between federal and state authority (the states were the remnants of sovereign governments, not provinces ruled form Berlin), the critical institutional role of the Reichswehr suppressing insurrections and trying to avoid outright civil war, and the looming threat of renewed war with France. Hitler released v. Kahr, v. Seisser, and v. Lossow because he believed they were on the same side, as Ludendorff had assured him.
https://famous-trials.com/hitler/2524-the-hitler-beer-hall-putsch-trial-an-account
Thanks for the Strauss lecture sdferr. Just great. Given in 1941 and still so relevant.