John Smyth
2024-10-24 14:53:43 UTC
Reply
Permalink'Literally Hitler? A Historian Examines Democrat Accusations Against
Trump and the GOP'
<https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/literally_hitler_a_historian_examines_democrat_accusations_against_trump_and_the_gop.html>
'Ever since Trump first ran for president, a central theme among
Democrats and the media has been that Trump is literally Hitler, and his
supporters -- namely, Republicans -- are literally Nazis. This has gone
viral in the 2024 campaign featuring the New Republic’s infamous cover
showing Trump as Hitler, published only a week before the first
assassination attempt against Trump in July.
As a historian who has done considerable writing and research into the
history of the Third Reich, I think it’s time that someone who actually
knows something about Hitler and Nazis to provide an assessment of these
charges. I studied in Germany and for more than three decades I have
spent many weeks in the German archives poring over documents of the
Third Reich so I could write many books and academic articles on the
Wehrmacht. The historians of the Bundeswehr’s History Office (authors of
outstanding scholarship on the Third Reich) thought enough of my
scholarship to commission me to author a chapter on Nazi war crimes in a
book on 20th-century war crimes.
I will focus on the two months of February 1933 to late March 1933
during which the democratic Weimar system was destroyed and replaced by
a one-party Nazi totalitarian state.
In January 1933, the German electorate was hopelessly split. Though the
Nazis had taken a beating and had lost votes in the November 1932
election, it remained the largest political party in Germany, with 34%
of the vote. Democracy-hating Nazis and Communists had just over half of
the Reichstag delegates, making any coalition of democratic parties
impossible.
On January 30, 1933, the senile and declining 85-year-old German
President Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was convinced by his
handlers to allow Hitler to become German chancellor and to lead a
coalition government. Leaders of major democratic political parties
accepted this, naively thinking that Hitler could be controlled. Many of
those party leaders would die or suffer imprisonment for their bad
judgement. Germany prided itself on following the rule of law, and most
democratic politicians could not imagine that the Nazis would turn on
them.
On February 4, 1933, Hitler coaxed President von Hindenburg into
approving new national elections for March 5. Hindenburg also granted
Hitler special emergency powers to use the police and censor the press
to keep order. Hitler intended to use these powers to win the election
and make the Nazis the majority by any means necessary.
Throwing Out Election Laws
The key to controlling Germany, a federation of 39 states, was control
of Prussia. The State of Prussia constituted over 60% of the German
landmass as well as 60% of the total German population. The Nazis
demanded that the government of Prussia should also call for a state
election, to be held concurrently with the national election. Prussian
law required the heads of both the chambers of the Prussian parliament,
the Landtag, approve a new election. But the president of the upper
chamber, Konrad Adenauer, the very popular mayor of Cologne and senior
leader of the Center Party, refused to give his assent. This stymied the
Nazi plans, so the Nazis simply declared that they could override the
Prussian Constitution and called the election anyway.
Censorship
The emergency regulations allowed the Nazis to censor any media stories
critical of them, and even to forcibly shut down opposition presses. At
the same time, the Nazi press ramped up its own media campaign,
hysterically describing moderate and democratic politicians like
Adenauer as traitors and criminals while forbidding them from publishing
any rebuttals.
Violence and Police Protection
Thanks to Chancellor Hitler, gangs of Nazi thugs from the SA were free
to roam the streets and attack the opposition, while the police were
stood down. Some prominent members of the democratic parties were
brutally beaten by Nazi thugs. Konrad Adenauer, under open threats by
the Nazis, requested police protection, which was denied. Adenauer was
unable to go into his mayor’s office, which was staked out by Nazi gangs
ready to maim or even kill him. In February and March 1933 Adenauer, a
major political leader, literally lived in hiding. For good measure, the
Nazis banned political rallies or meetings by opposition parties because
they might provoke violence (the major purveyors of violence being the
Nazis).
The Reichstag Fire as an Armed Insurrection
In the evening of February 27, 1933, the national legislature building,
the Reichstag, burst into flames that were so intense that the Berlin
fire department was helpless. Within hours, Chancellor Hitler declared
that Germany was facing an armed insurrection by the communists and
extracted from Hindenburg a more powerful decree giving Hitler
dictatorial powers to control the police and the authority to do
whatever it took to suppress the armed insurrection. The Nazis were
organized and prepared for this and within two days over 4,000 people
were arrested.
The armed insurrection was an insurrection without arms. The police
found few weapons and the thousands of arrested insurrectionists were
taken completely by surprise. This makes Nazi claims of saving Germany
from imminent revolution rather dubious. However, there are other
details about the Reichstag fire. The Nazis arrested a crazed Dutch
communist who confessed to setting the Reichstag fire, but does not
explain how the fire had spread so quickly. On the other hand, Hermann
Goering, the president of the Reichstag and number two man in the Nazi
Party, lived across the street from the Reichstag in his official
residence and had full access to the building. At the Nuremberg Trials,
General Franz Halder, former Army chief, testified that Göring had
bragged to him in 1942 that he had arranged to burn down the Reichstag.
Göring denied this at his trial, and the issue was dropped, as any
witnesses were dead or missing.
Lawfare
Despite their control of the media and suppression of opposition
parties, the Nazis again failed to win a majority. That was solved by
simply declaring that all the communist votes (15%) were invalid,
resulting in an instant Nazi majority. Immediately, all their opponents
from the democratic parties, the Social Democrats, the Center Party, and
Bavarian People’s Party, and German People’s Party were summarily thrown
out of office as the Nazis took complete control of the national and
state governments.
But gaming the election was not enough; the opposition leadership had to
be completely destroyed. In late March, prominent democratic opposition
leaders were arrested and charged with an array of phony charges, from
tax evasion to malfeasance. The list of charges filed by the Nazis would
make Merrick Garland proud. Konrad Adenauer was hit by a stack of
criminal charges and was dismissed from office, his property and bank
accounts seized so that he and his family were forced to live on charity
from friends until the Nazis, figuring he was broken, dropped charges
after four years and allowed him to retire. Fritz Schäffer, the finance
minister of Bavaria and a key leader of the Bavarian People’s Party, was
given the same treatment. Both would barely survive the Nazi era to lead
a free and prosperous West Germany.
As an observant reader will note, from censorship to lawfare it’s the
Democrat Party today -- not Republicans -- that has embraced the exact
same methods as the Nazis to seize power. But there is so much more. The
Democrat use of DEI as a mandatory race ideology is similar to Nazi
racial ideology -- just change whites for Jews in DEI training and you
get a good idea of what Nazi racial ideology was like. The current
attacks on academic freedom in universities in America also give you a
good idea of Nazi methods of 1933. But that’s for another article'