Extremely clear and very well written. Not sure it will do much to help the woke morons out there. We're lucky to have such a professional historian here on Substack.
There were various attempts to ban the Nazi party or Hitler himself as late as 1930 or so. Bans on the Nazi paramilitary (the SA, or stormtroopers) were somewhat more successful, as they could be broken up by the police or government militia (roughly, the National Guard).
I keep reading highly misleading stories about how Hitler allegedly "ended democracy in 53 days." Any democracy that can be ended in 53 days is obviously on its last legs. And the Weimar Republic was on its last legs well before Hitler took power in January 1933. The crucial turning point was the Great Depression, which really started to impinge on the German economy in 1930.
The late Republic was ruled by well-meaning but bumbling men who mostly had no idea what was happening or what to do. They put Germany into a state of emergency in 1930 which was never rescinded. One weak cabinet followed another, and the Reichstag was paralyzed (legislative paralysis being a chief characteristic of dying republics). The Nazis never got a majority, but with a plurality and the cooperation of several old-style parties of the pre-1918 conservatives (monarchists, aristocrats, etc.), Hitler was able to become Chancellor anyway. He simply expanded and deepened the state of emergency until all pretenses of democratic government were gone, including freedom of speech, assembly, and association; political pluralism; and all but tightly controlled elections. Oaths of loyalty ceased to be made to Germany or the constitution. Rather, they became oaths of unlimited loyalty to Hitler himself.
The sad part is that, had they seen the danger clearly, the three key democratic parties of the Weimar Republic (the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center, and the German People's Party), which consistently together made up more than 50% of the vote, could have blocked Hitler's accession to power, had they coordinated.
An interesting note: I have read much of Mein Kampf in the late senator Alan Cranston's 1940 translation. I purchased a copy in ninth grade, attempting to understand Hitler and why WWII happened. Both of my parents served in that war. I suppose nowadays, owning a copy of Mein Kampf would be followed by visits by the school psychologist, as well as social workers and maybe the police. When I was in high school in the 1970s, buying a copy was not seen as threatening at all. People wanted to figure this Hitler guy out.
The book is indeed pretty turgid. Part one, which recounts Hitler's childhood and adolescence in Austria, is moderately interesting. We learn that he loved and idealized his mother and hated his father, a customs officer of the multiethnic, multiconfessional Austro-Hungarian Empire that Adolf grew to loathe. All I remember from part two, which was very hard going, was that Germany in WWI had no strategy informed by a "scientific" ideology, and Hitler aimed to correct that. The next time around would include an all-encompassing ideology -- the Nazis' racial theories, which purported to explain all of human history -- that would counter international socialism (Marxist-Leninism) with "national" socialism, borrow aspects of it, while nonetheless making it thoroughly German-voelkisch. (Volk is one of those untranslatable words in German that doesn't mean "folk" in our sense. It's related to another hard-to-translate concept, gemeinschaft, as in volksgemeinschaft.)
One thing that did sound like Marxist-Leninism was that Germany, the nation-state, was simply a way station on the road to a racially-based empire. The Nazis would start by seizing control of Germany and then Austria. The ultimate goal was a pan-European Aryanism, so that nation-states and patriotism, as normally conceived, would disappear. So-called Aryans would be at top or near the top, and others would be either enslaved or exterminated. Humanistic values and institutions (including the Church) would be coopted and totally absorbed by the Nazi movement, although some Nazis toyed with an Aryanized version of Christianity, others of reviving the old Norse gods.
The main thing I got out of it was that (a) almost no one in Germany read the book, although it was widely given as a gift for weddings, for example; (b) Hitler was a psychopathic case; and (c) a much better use of one's time lay in reading some of the prewar and wartime assessments of Hitler's psychology. An American psychiatrist, Walter Langer, commissioned by the OSS and US Army, did just that. He nailed the main aspects of Hitler's mind and correctly predicted how Hitler would come to an end.
The Nazis burned books all over the country. That’s pretty good prima faci evidence that they weren’t big on freedom of speech. As you say, the so-called Weimar Republic tried and failed to suppress the Nazis and Hitler as well.Ms. Brennan’s ahistorical comment is moronic at best as every totalitarian regime as one of its first orders of business suppresses speech. The best history book in my opinion, though panned in academia, regarding the ordinary Germans and their relationship to the Holocaust was Daniel Goldhagen’s work, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. Af the end of the day there were many conditions which may have tilted Germany toward genocide, but mostly it takes a people predisposed to the act itself. Then again we saw during COVID that many Democrats would have gleefully put the unvaccinated in concentration camps without a second thought, so it pays to know your neighborhood totalitarian. As you say it wasn’t enough for the Germans to rid Germany of Jews, they had to kill them wherever they found them, and of course they helped themselves to the loot they robbed from their dead victims. Now that Germany is going down the tubes yet again and they can’t blame the Jews they threw out, and they won’t own their failure, the right wing has taken on the role of the German bogeyman. Meanwhile the immigrants from the ME and Asia bring their own special barbaric skill sets to the table.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer country.
The Democrats in America and the Left in Europe are far more inclined to suppress speech and the Der Starmer Labor Government are currently arresting English grandmothers and others for naughty comments on Facebook while child rapists and stabbers are ignored.
Very enlightened indeed. Meanwhile they, a la Ms. Brennan, invent perverse inverted straw man arguments about the fascists in MAGA. Nobody but the emotional developmentally arrested believe that anymore.
Such a well-written and well-researched article! You’re history is also great as well, Mr. Gregg! Indeed Margaret Brennan made a complete fool of herself when she made the claim to Secretary of State Rubio that the Nazis weaponized free speech in order to obtain power. Nothing could be further from the truth. What little efforts were made to stifle Hitler and the Nazis had no effect whatsoever and had the Weimar Republic tried to go further, it would’ve led to a Civil War. In addition, banning Mein Kampf would’ve had no effect either as the book wasn’t all that popular anyway and is in any case, dry as dust. None of this would’ve prevented Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party from rising to power. Furthermore, when the Nazis came to power they got rid of free speech and threw political dissenters into concentration camps. Liberal democrats, Communists, Socialists, and feminists were all repressed. Did the Nazis exploit free speech? Yes. But would taking it away from them have made a difference? No. Nor was it what helped them get to power that would be their rhetoric about making Germany great again, their nationalism and their economic and foreign policy achievements. It was also the intimidation and silencing of you’re average German along with the fog of war that kept Germans from speaking up about the terrible things going on in the Holocaust. Had Germany had free speech, the Holocaust could’ve been stopped. Germany’s lack of a first amendment and having the degree of free speech that America does hasn’t done anything to stifle antisemitism nor has it stopped the far-right from rising to power. You will note that the AfD finished second in the German elections. Also, it is precisely because Nazi symbolism and Holocaust Denial are banned in Germany that both are so popular and so prevalent in the country while in America both are legal and as a result the former is a fringe minority with no power hated by 99% of the country and the latter is a discredited idea no one takes seriously.
It’s stunning Margaret Brennan even postulated that concept. What world are we living in now. My father was close friends with Sherman Grinberg and worked in his photo lab in the early 1960’s preserving the films from the liberation of the camps, and other WW ll raw footage, German, Russian and other soldiers footage included as well. Western Civilization would do well reviewing the horrors of WW ll before they go carrying on about Ukraine and our European allies. Thank you for the excellent historical review. It can happen again as we are witnessing.
As I mentioned before, Margaret Brennen was just taking a cheap shot at J.D. Vance. That shows you how little she cares about boring stuff like the Holocaust.
Germany banned "Mein Kampf" until a few years ago.
German friends/family have asked me what the book said.
I explained that it was boring and almost impenetrable.
They believed me, but wanted to see for themselves. It was the censorship by the German government that gave the book a mystique that it did not deserve.
I asked my German uncles and aunts (children up to age 14 during the war) what they knew about the Holocaust.
Their answer was: "We knew that terrible things were happening, but we knew better than to ask." (The disappearance of handicapped people from the town was widely known - they saw the buses drive away.)
The censorship of the Third Reich worked.
As an aside. Talking to my friends and family about current conditions, they know that there is censorship in Germany (and know the consequences for saying something forbidden). But they don't know the exact limits of the censorship.
So they self-censor to a safe distance from what they think the limits are.
And that is the perniciousness of government censorship. People are frightened and avoid even relatively safe topics. That is one of the reasons relatively few people are arrested for violating the censorship laws.
The censorship of the Federal Government of Germany works.
All too true. Censorship is all too likely to find its footing in countries, however democratic they may style themselves, that have no strong, foundational tradition of civil liberties. In that respect, America is indeed exceptional, if not sui generis.
In its current form, censorship and related phenomena have erupted out of the postmodern universities, which have set themselves against liberal democracy as a matter of principle.
Germany in WWI under the Kaiser was under a far more restrictive government than England at the same time. Part of the reason that the German people felt so betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles was that their government lied to them that they were winning until the inevitable happened.
German was very authoritarian and valued blind obedience. They had no tradition of free speech like the UK or the US.
Think of the Nuremberg Laws as emptying academia and the Church of dissenting members. That was several years before WWII.
Her point was extremely ignorant of history. Really indefensible by anyone not ignorant.
What you note in your first paragraph is exactly right. And it’s true as you say that imperial Germany was an authoritarian state and society. But this was not so much the product of blind, robotic obedience as it was of the ordinary German’s reverence for constituted authorities and elites (to use the modern term). It was a high-trust society—which, as you say, was undermined by the experience of the Great War. In that sense, the rise of Hitler and National Socialism can be seen as the outcome of crisis of trust. And this has a familiar ring, has it not?
Extremely clear and very well written. Not sure it will do much to help the woke morons out there. We're lucky to have such a professional historian here on Substack.
There were various attempts to ban the Nazi party or Hitler himself as late as 1930 or so. Bans on the Nazi paramilitary (the SA, or stormtroopers) were somewhat more successful, as they could be broken up by the police or government militia (roughly, the National Guard).
I keep reading highly misleading stories about how Hitler allegedly "ended democracy in 53 days." Any democracy that can be ended in 53 days is obviously on its last legs. And the Weimar Republic was on its last legs well before Hitler took power in January 1933. The crucial turning point was the Great Depression, which really started to impinge on the German economy in 1930.
The late Republic was ruled by well-meaning but bumbling men who mostly had no idea what was happening or what to do. They put Germany into a state of emergency in 1930 which was never rescinded. One weak cabinet followed another, and the Reichstag was paralyzed (legislative paralysis being a chief characteristic of dying republics). The Nazis never got a majority, but with a plurality and the cooperation of several old-style parties of the pre-1918 conservatives (monarchists, aristocrats, etc.), Hitler was able to become Chancellor anyway. He simply expanded and deepened the state of emergency until all pretenses of democratic government were gone, including freedom of speech, assembly, and association; political pluralism; and all but tightly controlled elections. Oaths of loyalty ceased to be made to Germany or the constitution. Rather, they became oaths of unlimited loyalty to Hitler himself.
The sad part is that, had they seen the danger clearly, the three key democratic parties of the Weimar Republic (the Social Democrats, the Catholic Center, and the German People's Party), which consistently together made up more than 50% of the vote, could have blocked Hitler's accession to power, had they coordinated.
An interesting note: I have read much of Mein Kampf in the late senator Alan Cranston's 1940 translation. I purchased a copy in ninth grade, attempting to understand Hitler and why WWII happened. Both of my parents served in that war. I suppose nowadays, owning a copy of Mein Kampf would be followed by visits by the school psychologist, as well as social workers and maybe the police. When I was in high school in the 1970s, buying a copy was not seen as threatening at all. People wanted to figure this Hitler guy out.
The book is indeed pretty turgid. Part one, which recounts Hitler's childhood and adolescence in Austria, is moderately interesting. We learn that he loved and idealized his mother and hated his father, a customs officer of the multiethnic, multiconfessional Austro-Hungarian Empire that Adolf grew to loathe. All I remember from part two, which was very hard going, was that Germany in WWI had no strategy informed by a "scientific" ideology, and Hitler aimed to correct that. The next time around would include an all-encompassing ideology -- the Nazis' racial theories, which purported to explain all of human history -- that would counter international socialism (Marxist-Leninism) with "national" socialism, borrow aspects of it, while nonetheless making it thoroughly German-voelkisch. (Volk is one of those untranslatable words in German that doesn't mean "folk" in our sense. It's related to another hard-to-translate concept, gemeinschaft, as in volksgemeinschaft.)
One thing that did sound like Marxist-Leninism was that Germany, the nation-state, was simply a way station on the road to a racially-based empire. The Nazis would start by seizing control of Germany and then Austria. The ultimate goal was a pan-European Aryanism, so that nation-states and patriotism, as normally conceived, would disappear. So-called Aryans would be at top or near the top, and others would be either enslaved or exterminated. Humanistic values and institutions (including the Church) would be coopted and totally absorbed by the Nazi movement, although some Nazis toyed with an Aryanized version of Christianity, others of reviving the old Norse gods.
The main thing I got out of it was that (a) almost no one in Germany read the book, although it was widely given as a gift for weddings, for example; (b) Hitler was a psychopathic case; and (c) a much better use of one's time lay in reading some of the prewar and wartime assessments of Hitler's psychology. An American psychiatrist, Walter Langer, commissioned by the OSS and US Army, did just that. He nailed the main aspects of Hitler's mind and correctly predicted how Hitler would come to an end.
The Nazis burned books all over the country. That’s pretty good prima faci evidence that they weren’t big on freedom of speech. As you say, the so-called Weimar Republic tried and failed to suppress the Nazis and Hitler as well.Ms. Brennan’s ahistorical comment is moronic at best as every totalitarian regime as one of its first orders of business suppresses speech. The best history book in my opinion, though panned in academia, regarding the ordinary Germans and their relationship to the Holocaust was Daniel Goldhagen’s work, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”. Af the end of the day there were many conditions which may have tilted Germany toward genocide, but mostly it takes a people predisposed to the act itself. Then again we saw during COVID that many Democrats would have gleefully put the unvaccinated in concentration camps without a second thought, so it pays to know your neighborhood totalitarian. As you say it wasn’t enough for the Germans to rid Germany of Jews, they had to kill them wherever they found them, and of course they helped themselves to the loot they robbed from their dead victims. Now that Germany is going down the tubes yet again and they can’t blame the Jews they threw out, and they won’t own their failure, the right wing has taken on the role of the German bogeyman. Meanwhile the immigrants from the ME and Asia bring their own special barbaric skill sets to the table.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer country.
The Democrats in America and the Left in Europe are far more inclined to suppress speech and the Der Starmer Labor Government are currently arresting English grandmothers and others for naughty comments on Facebook while child rapists and stabbers are ignored.
Very enlightened indeed. Meanwhile they, a la Ms. Brennan, invent perverse inverted straw man arguments about the fascists in MAGA. Nobody but the emotional developmentally arrested believe that anymore.
Yes, I’ve read that book and with certain reservations I think it explains a lot about Nazi Germany.
Such a well-written and well-researched article! You’re history is also great as well, Mr. Gregg! Indeed Margaret Brennan made a complete fool of herself when she made the claim to Secretary of State Rubio that the Nazis weaponized free speech in order to obtain power. Nothing could be further from the truth. What little efforts were made to stifle Hitler and the Nazis had no effect whatsoever and had the Weimar Republic tried to go further, it would’ve led to a Civil War. In addition, banning Mein Kampf would’ve had no effect either as the book wasn’t all that popular anyway and is in any case, dry as dust. None of this would’ve prevented Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party from rising to power. Furthermore, when the Nazis came to power they got rid of free speech and threw political dissenters into concentration camps. Liberal democrats, Communists, Socialists, and feminists were all repressed. Did the Nazis exploit free speech? Yes. But would taking it away from them have made a difference? No. Nor was it what helped them get to power that would be their rhetoric about making Germany great again, their nationalism and their economic and foreign policy achievements. It was also the intimidation and silencing of you’re average German along with the fog of war that kept Germans from speaking up about the terrible things going on in the Holocaust. Had Germany had free speech, the Holocaust could’ve been stopped. Germany’s lack of a first amendment and having the degree of free speech that America does hasn’t done anything to stifle antisemitism nor has it stopped the far-right from rising to power. You will note that the AfD finished second in the German elections. Also, it is precisely because Nazi symbolism and Holocaust Denial are banned in Germany that both are so popular and so prevalent in the country while in America both are legal and as a result the former is a fringe minority with no power hated by 99% of the country and the latter is a discredited idea no one takes seriously.
Much of what you say is true. At the end of the day, a liberal democracy can’t defend itself by violating its own fundamental principles.
It’s stunning Margaret Brennan even postulated that concept. What world are we living in now. My father was close friends with Sherman Grinberg and worked in his photo lab in the early 1960’s preserving the films from the liberation of the camps, and other WW ll raw footage, German, Russian and other soldiers footage included as well. Western Civilization would do well reviewing the horrors of WW ll before they go carrying on about Ukraine and our European allies. Thank you for the excellent historical review. It can happen again as we are witnessing.
As I mentioned before, Margaret Brennen was just taking a cheap shot at J.D. Vance. That shows you how little she cares about boring stuff like the Holocaust.
A sadly typical case of our highly credentialed and expensively miseducated elite.
Beautifully Written
So relevant to todays world.
Excellent column.
Thoughts on German censorship.
Germany banned "Mein Kampf" until a few years ago.
German friends/family have asked me what the book said.
I explained that it was boring and almost impenetrable.
They believed me, but wanted to see for themselves. It was the censorship by the German government that gave the book a mystique that it did not deserve.
I asked my German uncles and aunts (children up to age 14 during the war) what they knew about the Holocaust.
Their answer was: "We knew that terrible things were happening, but we knew better than to ask." (The disappearance of handicapped people from the town was widely known - they saw the buses drive away.)
The censorship of the Third Reich worked.
As an aside. Talking to my friends and family about current conditions, they know that there is censorship in Germany (and know the consequences for saying something forbidden). But they don't know the exact limits of the censorship.
So they self-censor to a safe distance from what they think the limits are.
And that is the perniciousness of government censorship. People are frightened and avoid even relatively safe topics. That is one of the reasons relatively few people are arrested for violating the censorship laws.
The censorship of the Federal Government of Germany works.
All too true. Censorship is all too likely to find its footing in countries, however democratic they may style themselves, that have no strong, foundational tradition of civil liberties. In that respect, America is indeed exceptional, if not sui generis.
In its current form, censorship and related phenomena have erupted out of the postmodern universities, which have set themselves against liberal democracy as a matter of principle.
Germany in WWI under the Kaiser was under a far more restrictive government than England at the same time. Part of the reason that the German people felt so betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles was that their government lied to them that they were winning until the inevitable happened.
German was very authoritarian and valued blind obedience. They had no tradition of free speech like the UK or the US.
Think of the Nuremberg Laws as emptying academia and the Church of dissenting members. That was several years before WWII.
Her point was extremely ignorant of history. Really indefensible by anyone not ignorant.
What you note in your first paragraph is exactly right. And it’s true as you say that imperial Germany was an authoritarian state and society. But this was not so much the product of blind, robotic obedience as it was of the ordinary German’s reverence for constituted authorities and elites (to use the modern term). It was a high-trust society—which, as you say, was undermined by the experience of the Great War. In that sense, the rise of Hitler and National Socialism can be seen as the outcome of crisis of trust. And this has a familiar ring, has it not?