March 6, 2025 • 42 mins
Historian Benjamin Carter Hett and author of "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic," is a leading expert on fascism, the alarmingly rapid decline of German democracy, and Hitler's rise to power. In this video, he discusses the future of American Democracy and the lessons we can learn from history.
Join us for an insightful conversation on democracy, the rule of law, and the future of America! This event, hosted by United to Preserve Democracy and the Rule of Law, features a discussion between Benjamin Carter Hett and democracyFIRST Executive Director, Jordan Wood. 🔍 What You’ll Learn: ✅ The biggest threats to democracy in the U.S. and globally ✅ How history helps us understand modern democratic decline ✅ What Americans can do to protect democracy and the rule of law
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Episode Transcript
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excited to be joined today by Professor Benjamin Carter-Hett.
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Ben is a professor of history at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
He is also one of the leading experts
and historians on the rise of Nazism in Germany
in the fall of the Weimar Republic.
His recent books on the topic include
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The Death of Democracy, Hitler's Rite
and the Last to Power in the Downfall of the Weimar Republic.
So it's really one of the leading experts
to learn from in this moment where authoritarianism
and fascism feel so creeping into our politics
and we fight to make sure we can preserve democracy
and the rule of law.
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So Ben, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks Jordan.
I'm delighted to be with you.
To start, the last time we spoke was before the election.
I wanted to get your immediate reactions to this outcome
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and how you're thinking about it as a historian.
Interesting question.
I mean, my immediate reaction on a human level was gloom.
As a historian, I guess it's gloom tempered
with a little bit of, I don't know, historical background.
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Given what I write about, people always
ask me about parallels between 1933 in Germany and now.
And there are some, I think, slight parallels.
I don't think they're strong.
In terms of what we've seen in the early weeks of Trump's
second administration, the strongest parallel
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seems to me his treatment of the federal government
and the federal civil service.
One of the first things that the Nazis did when they came
into power was they passed a law with a very long name
that was called the law for the reform of the professional
civil service, which basically gave them the legal tool
to remake what was essentially the German federal government,
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Germany is a federal state like the United States.
So the national government level government departments
could be remade so the Nazis could fire people they didn't
like and hire people they did like.
They had basically two categories that particularly
would lead you to be dismissed.
One's, I think, intuitively obvious.
If they deemed you to be Jewish, you would be fired.
The other, there was a kind of long phrase
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that went basically if your record indicates
you won't stand up for the nationalist state,
then you would be fired.
That basically translated meant if you
were a liberal social Democrat, something
like that, liberal left or center right,
even you would be fired.
So they very quickly reshaped the federal government
to be something that was a more useful tool for them.
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And this sounds, I think, a fair bit of resonance
with what's happening with Elon Musk and Doge.
Other than that, I think the parallels so far at least
are not overwhelmingly strong.
One of the first things he did as president
was part in the January 6th insurrectionists.
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And I think it's important to distinguish here
that in the campaign, he did indicate he wanted to do this,
but he also left voters with the impression
that it would be nonviolent offenders.
And it included individuals that had never really
been in our imagination that could be pardoned,
specifically Stuart Rhodes and Enrique Torres, who
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were actually not even there on January 6th.
They had already been arrested by the FBI,
both for facing decades in prison,
for conspiring to overturn the government.
They were charged with essentially political terrorism.
And again, they weren't in the wrong place,
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wrong time.
These people were not even actually
allowed to be there because of their criminality.
To me, there is no appetite with the public for what
he has done in making those pardons.
And it remains one of the most unpopular things
he has done as president.
So it seems that he's doing it for power and control
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and an endorsement of political violence.
But if you could talk about how you interpret those pardons
and what it says about political violence
and the role that political violence had in the rise
of Nazism.
Sure.
Well, Trump has a bit of a track record
with, I think, recognizing that people
like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and the 3%ers
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and so on are a possible reservoir of strength for him,
including in events like January 6th
or some future January 6th type scenario.
So I definitely think that there is an element here,
a little bit like in the 2020 campaign when
he said in the debate, stand back but stand by.
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There's a little bit of, I think,
consciously keeping those people in reserve
should there come a time when having people like that
at his side is useful.
The parallel here to the things that I write about
is that the Nazis famously had their paramilitary forces known
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by a number of names known technically as the storm
sections, informally as storm troopers or brownshirts.
This was a paramilitary force that the Nazis could use,
basically to inflict violence on their opponents
and to gain control of politically key territory,
like key neighborhoods in Berlin or Hamburg
or other major cities.
And again, there is a loose, I want
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to stress, loose analogy between groups
like the Proud Boys and the Nazi brownshirts.
It's loose in part because the numbers
are much, much different.
When by the time Hitler came to power,
there were about 3 million, mostly young men,
in the Nazi brownshirts.
And considered as a proportion of a nation of 65 million,
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that's vastly more than anything in the American paramilitary
groups.
So in that sense, the parallel is loose.
But the thinking in terms of how you can use people like this
as a political tool, including the use of political violence
as a political tool, and not just to gain control
but also for its propaganda values,
all of that is a bit of a rough parallel between how
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I think Trump thinks about these things
and how they worked in early 1930s Germany.
And to think about 1930s Germany, correct me here,
but the first election that Nazis really had traction
was in 1930, is that right?
And then there were subsequent elections.
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The more ambitious right wing legislation and policies,
was that after the 33 election?
Or can you help us understand the timeline here?
And I think it's important to know that there were elections
once the Nazis had actually gained
power before they stopped them.
There was one basically.
There was one kind of semi free election
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after Hitler had come into office as chancellor.
And you're quite right.
There was this sort of blizzard of elections in the early 1930s.
The details can get confusing, but there
were a lot of elections at both national and state level,
with the basic narrative being the Nazis gained quite rapidly
in support until they hit a line of about a third
of the electorate, which they never
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improved on in a free election.
The last fully free election was in November 1932,
at which the Nazis got a third or so of the vote.
That made them the biggest party by a fair margin,
because the next biggest party had about 20%.
But still, it's a third of the vote.
They're nowhere near a majority.
Then for various complicated reasons,
Hitler was nonetheless offered the chancellorship,
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and he was brought into office as chancellor
with a coalition cabinet in which only two other out of 11
people were Nazis.
The rest were kind of establishment conservatives.
But then right away, they move into another election campaign,
because Hitler thought correctly that as an incumbent,
he could improve on his previous election outcomes.
And so there was an election in March 1933, early March.
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And here the Nazis, they did do better.
They got about 43% of the votes, still not a majority,
but they're best showing.
But that was a semi-free election,
because the Nazis were doing all kinds of things by then.
They were arresting opponents in very large numbers,
especially after a week before the election.
There was the famous event of the Reichstag fire,
after which they proclaimed an emergency decree, which
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gave them limitless arrest power.
So they were arresting thousands of their opponents.
They were shutting down opposition newspapers.
They had control of the radio, so they could use the radio,
and they could exclude opponents from the radio.
They could use the police to break up rallies and speeches
and meetings of other parties.
So it's not a fully free election.
But even in those circumstances, the Nazis still,
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they had hoped for a majority, and they still didn't get it.
They got, as I said, 43%.
Their coalition partners, the kind of main right of center,
traditional conservative party, with them
they had a bare majority of 51%.
And then, as you said, quite rightly,
then after that come most of the main steps
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of the Nazis' consolidation of power.
The only thing really before that March election
was the Reichstag fire and the famous Reichstag fire decree,
which, as I said, gave the Nazis limitless arrest
power and various other things, including, very importantly,
the ability to take over state governments
within the German Federation.
But then the other big things come after,
the thing we talked about before of taking
over the civil service.
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They got a law through the parliament, the Reichstag,
called the Enabling Act, by which the parliament basically
gave Hitler's cabinet all of its lawmaking powers
for four years.
So at that point, Hitler really is effectively a dictator.
That comes after the election.
And then they move very quickly.
They outlaw every other political party except the Nazis.
They outlaw free labor unions, any kind of media outlet
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that as opposed to them gets shut down.
So within a few months, really by July of 1933,
this process is complete and Hitler is very squarely
in dictatorial control.
So the process took under a half year.
So Ben, would you say that it is true that there were moments
where the Reichstag and the elected assembly
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could have used their authority to stop this,
but really what they ended up is passing legislation that
ceded their power and authority to this individual?
That's exactly right.
When Hitler got that enabling act at the end of March 1933,
he had to convince the basically the sort of centrist parties
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to go along with him.
And they did.
They were sort of partly kind of bribed and partly
intimidated into going along.
They didn't have to do that.
The sort of mainstream liberal and conservative parties,
they were all quite small by this point
and didn't have a lot of seats.
More importantly, there was a party called the Center, which
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was a party purely for German Catholics.
And it still had a substantial presence in the Reichstag.
It's voted held up.
And the Center was convinced to vote for the enabling act.
Again, partly sort of bribed with promises of good treatment
for the Catholic Church and partly intimidated.
If the center hadn't gone along with it,
then the enabling act wouldn't have got the votes it needed
to pass.
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It was a constitutional amendment which needed a 2-thirds vote.
And they wouldn't have gotten the 2-thirds vote.
So yes, absolutely.
They could have done more to stop it.
But in the whole sort of atmosphere, partly fear
and partly sort of promises, they took the path of least
resistance and gave Hitler what he wanted.
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So it's sort of thinking about ways
that history could have gone differently.
I think it's very obvious that voters, if the public had
recognized the threat and not elected the Nazis,
but also that the assembly, the Reichstag, had not done that.
What other things jump out to you that
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are these inflection points, these forks in the road,
actually, to use an Elon Musk subject line
for laying off federal employees, that we should look for.
We should think about.
Hitler would not have gotten anywhere
if powerful established elites had not, in a sense,
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invited him into power.
To be chancellor in the German system,
this is still true today, you have
to be asked by the president to become chancellor
and to form a cabinet.
And the president at that time, separately elected
by the people, was the celebrated World War
1 military supreme commander, Field Marshal Paul von
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Hindenburg, who didn't like Hitler
and didn't like the Nazis, but was persuaded
to choose Hitler chancellor.
To some extent, this is clearer now from recent research,
to some extent by considerable efforts by the Nazis
to basically threaten him and blackmail him.
There were some kind of scandals floating around Hindenburg.
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And the Nazis basically said, we will impeach you.
There is an impeachment.
There was an impeachment mechanism in the Vivermark
Constitution, kind of like ours.
They said, we will impeach you over these scandals
if you don't do this.
And Hindenburg, really on the basis of that,
seems to have turned around quite quickly
within a few days in January 1933 and agreed to name Hitler
as chancellor.
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If Hindenburg hadn't done that, Hindenburg
had no path to getting to the chancellorship that
didn't run through Hindenburg.
So there's that.
And in a broader sense, the people are right.
Just to wait, I just understand that, Ben.
So whether it was corruption or infidelity,
but it was used as a way of blackmailing Hindenburg.
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This is, to be honest, this is somewhat speculative.
This is a conclusion that a lot of historians,
including me, have reached on sort of looking at the evidence.
Particularly, there were sort of tax scandals about what
Hindenburg had done with his estate that
made him vulnerable to this.
And then there is sort of circumstantial evidence
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that the Nazis were using this to threaten him
with impeachment if he didn't make Hitler a chancellor.
And in a sort of broader way, a lot of the people around
Hindenburg, his advisors, who were generally senior military
men, there were also people in that milieu who
were senior business leaders.
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They all calculated, and here, just to make this clear,
here is where I think there's a bit of an analogy to our politics
over the last decade in the United States.
These were what you might call establishment Republicans,
in a sense, who knew that their agenda of building up
the armed forces and reducing the bite of the regulatory state
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on business, that didn't have traction in the electorate.
And so they needed an electoral base
if they wanted to do what they wanted to do.
And here's Hitler and the Nazis, who now have the biggest
electoral base in the country.
It's not an electoral base for the established elite
or its agenda, but it is an electoral base
that is nationalist, pro-military certainly,
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very certainly anti-communist.
So the elites think, two-thirds, kind of usable.
We can maybe do business with this guy in his party.
We can probably manipulate him because they
don't have a high opinion of Hitler
who doesn't seem sophisticated or educated or experienced.
He's not an aristocratic leader the way these established
gentlemen are.
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So they think they can manipulate him.
Hitler, for his part, understands
that the path to power is through them.
So they're kind of using each other.
And here I think there is a fairly close analogy
to establishment Republicans and MAGA Republicans.
And of course, the outcome of the story
is Hitler and his people succeed in using the establishment
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as the gateway into power.
And then quite quickly turn on the establishment
and basically kind of run them out of town.
And again, within a few months, the establishment conservatives
are kind of wringing their hands and thinking, oh my god,
what have we done?
Because it has gotten away from them.
They learned too late that they had underestimated Hitler's
ability to grab power and his ruthlessness
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and how he could grab power.
At the start of this conversation,
we talked about sort of the parallel around doge.
And they very quickly have taken over the Department of Justice
and politicized it also with Kash Batel being
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confirmed to be FBI director.
We've seen, I think, for those of us
that are very concerned about the rule of law,
what has been going on with the mayor of New York City,
Eric Adams, where this seems like they are using these charges
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as a way of controlling the mayor.
But Ed Martin, who's now the attorney for the District
of Columbia, that was a lawyer for January 6,
insurrectionists, has withheld waiting for indication
from the White House certain charges.
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So it seems like we're looking at that behavior
and the politicization of the Department of Justice.
How do you see those actions?
Again, that marks in some ways a parallel to the German
experience of the 30s.
In some ways, Trump has gone farther with that
than the Nazis did, at least in the earlier phases.
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The parallel is closer with the police.
The Nazis were very quick to get the police under their control.
One of the first things, or actually,
pretty much the first thing they did.
And when I mentioned that in Hitler's first cabinet,
only two other people were Nazis.
But one of those was very key.
It was a man who became quite infamous later on,
Hermann Goetting, who had a lot of jobs in Nazi Germany,
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including head of the Air Force.
But his first big job was to be interior minister
of the state of Prussia, the state of Prussia being,
at that time, 2 thirds of Germany in both land and population.
And Prussia had its own police force, about 50,000 men.
And as interior minister, Goetting had control
of that police force.
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So putting Goetting and Nazi in control of the Prussian police
was a very big deal, which the Nazis used utterly ruthlessly
to, as I was saying before, arrest opponents
and crack down on the opposition.
And they actually then drafted their own paramilitaries.
Whoops, sorry about that.
They drafted their own paramilitaries into the police.
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So the stormtroopers become kind of like honorary police
officers.
And you can imagine how that goes.
Oddly enough, at the sort of level of the Department
of Justice, so to speak, the German, the Reich Justice
Ministry, had for the first eight years
that Hitler was in power, a pretty establishment figure
as minister of justice, who, within the limits of what
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you could do in Hitler's regime, ran things fairly straight.
The sort of corruption of the courts and the legal system
as such was actually rather slow in Nazi Germany compared
to what happened with the police.
You wrote an op-ed in the LA Times
with a fellow historian Ruth Ben-Gaet, who's
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an expert specifically on the rise of Mussolini and Italy,
on taking seriously the threat that Trump proposed
in the last election of not having
free and fair elections anymore.
Talk a bit about that concern you had taking seriously
this threat, because it, I think,
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is a really resonant point.
Yeah.
I mean, this is something that Trump says over and over again,
just as lately he's been saying over and over again
that he'd like to run again in 2028, or that he's a king,
or various versions of this.
I wouldn't claim to be, you know,
I'm a historian of Germany.
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I'm not a journalist on American politics now.
So my predictions should be taken with all due salt.
But it seems to me, having said that,
I cannot imagine that if he is still reasonably healthy
in 2028, he will leave office unless he's really forced to,
one way or another.
And my biggest, well, my two biggest concerns
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worries with this iteration of the Trump administration,
one that sooner or later, American soldiers
will be shooting Americans in demonstrations
on American soil, and two, that we will not
have fully free elections one way or another,
that Trump will do whatever he can to keep us
from having fully free elections.
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As Ruth and I said in that piece,
you need to, I think, listen very carefully
when authoritarian types like Trump tell you what they
would like to do, because I think Trump's track record is,
even though he throws some of this stuff out seemingly
off the cuff, he means it.
I mean, whether or not he succeeds in doing it,
he wants to succeed in doing it, and he will try to do it.
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So I think we need to be super, super vigilant
about keeping the kind of channels
of our electoral machinery safe.
And as our, in a democracy, our true form of accountability
to that action, I don't think there was really
public polling or opinion surveys in the 30s.
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I could be wrong, but how do you have any sense
from your work as to sort of how the population felt
as they were disenfranchised really
throughout the 30s until the end of the war?
Regret, I just sort of, how do people respond to that?
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And so.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question,
and you're right, they didn't have,
I mean, there was opinion polling in the United States
at that time, there wasn't in Germany.
And in a dictatorship, for obvious reasons,
you can't do opinion polling.
However, that being said, there are really interesting sources
on German public opinion under the Nazis.
There are sort of two main ones, especially for the 1930s.
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The Social Democratic Party, which was outlawed
and its operatives went into exile,
but the organization sort of operating underground
in Germany did opinion work as much as they could
by sort of talking to people, and they put together reports.
And we have those reports of what the Social Democrats
thought people were thinking.
And then from the other side, even more amazingly,
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the Nazi security services did as sophisticated opinion
research as you could do in that environment.
They would do things like they would send undercover police
officers basically to like bars and working class areas,
and they would sit around in the bars
and they would strike up a conversation and say
to some guy in overalls in a tool belt, hey, man,
what do you think of what the Fuhrer is doing?
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And they would write it all down.
And these two, they've been published.
You can read them.
They're fascinating, because they actually
gave a lot of bad news to Hitler and the leaders.
Always carefully sandwiched.
These reports, there's a formula to them.
I've read a lot of these things.
The approach is paragraph one.
Everybody loves the Fuhrer.
Things are going great.
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Germans are loving what's happening.
Paragraph two, well, there are a few people kind of unhappy
with the shortages of potatoes and meat,
and there's been a lot of grumbling about this.
And then they would sort of give the bad news,
and then they end up saying, but in the end,
everybody loves the Fuhrer.
So it's how you do this in a highly authoritarian state.
If you sort of boil this all down,
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we do know historians of Nazi Germany,
we do actually know quite a bit about the sort of arc
of public opinion.
And what I think is interesting and maybe for us important
is the arc follows what I might call kind of predictable
contours, and it has kind of predictable reactions, which
are not unlike even in these first six weeks or so of Trump
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to what we've seen.
I.e. in particular, it's economic issues
that are going to get people.
And if people feel they're doing well materially,
they'll be probably relatively OK with things.
If they feel they're not, they'll be relatively not OK.
And one thing we know for instance
is that in the first year Hitler was in power,
his popularity declined quite sharply.
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He had a honeymoon.
We're so familiar with this concept.
Hitler had a honeymoon in March, April 1933.
But that honeymoon really chilled off.
And by the spring of 1934, the regime
was quite unpopular because things weren't really
getting better yet economically.
And there were other things too.
People were unhappy with the storm troopers who were around,
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and they were getting bored, and they were inflicting violence
on people who weren't sort of in their usual target areas.
And people were quite unhappy about all that.
So by spring, early summer of 34, the regime
knew it's in a bit of a public opinion crisis with people.
And there was that kind of cycle throughout the regime.
And the other thing we know is that then in the 30s,
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as the economy got better and employment got better,
Hitler's popularity rose.
And then towards the end of the 1930s,
as I'm sure a lot of folks will know,
he had some diplomatic successes in a sense,
getting control of Austria and then getting control
of part of Czechoslovakia, a sort of threatening war,
but ultimately doing it without war.
And Germans were quite thrilled about that.
One famous historian has written that if Hitler had
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died in late 1938, people would have forgotten
about the concentration camps, which there were already
at that time.
And they forget about the oppression and everything
else.
And he would be revered as the greatest German statesman ever
because he brought Austria and Germany together
and the German parts of Czechoslovakia together and so on.
So this guy writes basically darn, just six years separated
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him from that.
Because last year, was that author?
The author is a German named Joachim Fest.
He was a high-end journalist.
He wrote for the paper, the Frankfurt Algemann Zeitung.
And he wrote a big biography of Hitler.
I would just put it in the war comes.
And the war, especially as the war turned nasty
for the Germans after 1942 or so,
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the popularity of the regime really went downhill.
And although Hitler's popularity itself actually
held up pretty well, the common reaction the Germans had
was, oh, the Fuhrer doesn't know.
Things are terrible, but people are keeping the knowledge
from him.
He would fix it if he knew.
You know, I actually just wanted to pivot to the economy.
It's a great point.
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There are certain decisions specifically around tariffs,
but others that economists say, like,
there's not really a way that this will not have,
will not result in increased prices at every level
or on inflation for regular consumers,
the positive building and other things.
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You know, were there policies that they were pushing
when they took power that were trying
to appeal to a certain political base?
In Trump's case, you know, Rust Belt union workers
or other people that have lost jobs because of free trade
deals, was there any examples to point to like that?
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In a rough sort of way, yes.
The policies were probably, in a way,
more strategic about how they handled that than Trump.
I mean, one of the things that I think
is quite amazing about Trump is, I mean, I completely agree.
And I mean, I'm not an economist,
but from everything I read from economists,
these tariffs are just going to be disastrous for ordinary people
(28:21):
and for inflation.
And Trump's clearly not sort of thoughtful about it
because he keeps introducing them and then pulling them back
and introducing them and pulling them back.
And that doesn't speak to a very systematic thought process.
The Nazis were a lot more systematic.
I mean, Heather was very clear on what he wanted.
He wanted an economy that could produce a lot of weapons.
He wanted to really build up, you know,
(28:42):
in a sense, the military industrial complex, if you will.
And he had a very smart central banker and economics minister,
very eminent man named Helmar Schacht.
And Schacht knew how to do this.
And so in a sense, to achieve what Hitler wanted,
the economic policy was good.
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And it took a little while, but it did happen.
And we know that it was the rearmament drive that really
fueled the economy in the 1930s.
So that by 1937, 1938, Germany has fully recovered
from the Great Depression, quite different from the United
States in that time, by the way.
They had hit full employment and the economy is just
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ticking along.
They're actually starting to get inflationary worries
because the economy is ticking along so well.
So I don't think, I mean, Hitler did not
so much have the kind of self-defeating
and somewhat irrational policies that, at least so far,
we've seen from Trump.
The problem was, I mean, ultimately,
that the economy he was creating was
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an economy for military production
and not for civilian consumption.
And so ordinary people did not get the benefits out of it
that they could have.
What we know is that full employment returned,
but wages did not rise.
So people were doing a little better because they had jobs,
but they weren't doing better because wages went up.
Because basically, the wages were sort of confiscated
(30:07):
by the regime to pay for our commitments.
Want to shift to foreign policy here.
We're, Trump coming into office has done very drastically
and quickly changed the US's position in the world
on foreign policy specifically around Ukraine,
(30:28):
seemingly aligning us, the United States with Russia,
over Ukraine.
Give us your interpretation of this,
but also when the Nazis took power,
was there a change in foreign policy
or in alignment with Italy and other countries?
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Was that going on, on an international level?
Yes, although more slowly than we've seen it here.
When Hitler came to power, I mean, in foreign policy terms,
he comes to power in a vastly different context.
He comes to power in a context where Germany is very weak,
both economically and militarily.
And Hitler knew this, and he didn't
(31:12):
want to provoke trouble too soon.
So he was very careful.
Early on, a few months into being in power,
he gave a big speech about peace that all Germany wanted
his peace, and they weren't going to threaten their neighbors.
One of his early moves was to sign a non-aggression treaty
with Poland to reassure the Poles and to bolster
(31:35):
that relationship.
He was quite concerned to cultivate
good relations with the British, and he
spent a lot of effort in the 30s trying to do that.
Of course, there was a gradual shift,
and he did eventually line up with Italy,
although that didn't happen fast.
Italy was still, having been on the side of the British
(31:55):
and French in World War I, Italy was still
a bit of a swing seed, if you will.
And as late as 1935, in what's called the Strese Front,
there were efforts by the British and the French
to get Italy to line up with them against Germany.
It was actually Italy's attack on Ethiopia
(32:16):
in those days, Abyssinia, in 1935,
and the fact that the British and French came out
against that, but Germany was sympathetic.
That's what starts the process of Italy kind of then
moving into the German orbit, or maybe Germany
moving into the Italian orbit at that time
would be a better way to phrase it.
So there is a diplomatic alignment,
and there is a diplomatic alignment a little bit
like what we are seeing right now in the sense of moving
(32:39):
into a kind of authoritarian front,
but it happened much more slowly with Hitler.
There's nothing like this, like a few weeks
that we've seen decades, if not more than decades,
of American foreign policy being turned on its head.
It's alarmingly fast.
(32:59):
I want to turn to the flow of information and propaganda
and how Hitler demonized most notably Jewish people,
but other LGBTQ, however they would have referred to them,
Roma, other people groups.
(33:21):
But the minority, they have one commonality,
which is they were minorities.
And it seems that also that the anti-Semitism
was very connected to immigration,
that there was a flow of immigration.
Can you talk about what the demonization of that people
(33:42):
group, how that played into their propaganda
and the overall political movement they had?
Sure.
So one of the things that is striking, I think,
about German politics in the 20s and early 30s,
to your point about immigration, is that,
and this sounds very familiar, control of the border
(34:04):
was a very big political deal before the Nazis came to power.
And the border they were talking about
was the border with Poland, the new border, of course,
after World War I. And Germany did not
have the military or police manpower
to control flows of refugees across that border.
And because of the Russian Revolution and Civil War
and other things going on east of Germany,
(34:24):
there were huge flows of people across that border, hundreds
of thousands in the 20s, of which an estimated,
I believe the figure is an estimated 80,000 or so,
were Jews from what had become Poland
or what is now Russia and was then becoming the Soviet Union.
The terms and borders are complicated.
And the Jews who were coming from Eastern Europe into Germany
(34:47):
were conspicuous to most Germans, because prior to that,
German Jews had been pretty assimilated.
And for the most part, the German Jews community
was tiny as a shared population.
But they were also very assimilated,
identified heavily with Germany, would have dressed
as any other German did and sort of lived and worked
as any other German did.
And they were sort of semi-invisible.
(35:09):
The Jews that start coming in from Eastern Europe
after World War I are very conspicuous.
They're often Orthodox and they dress differently
and they look differently and they speak differently
and they're very conspicuous.
And so this starts to fuel the sort of linked issues
of border control and visibly different people coming in,
sort of flow together.
And they're a gift really to Nazi propaganda,
(35:32):
especially of course, anti-Semitic propaganda.
With the other groups you mentioned, it's interesting.
The Nazis do end up, of course, massively persecuting
and basically murdering LGBTQ people
and the Sinti and Roma and other people
with handicaps and groups like that.
All of that comes later though.
(35:54):
And the LGBTQ issue is actually particularly interesting,
well, specifically the gay men issue
is particularly interesting because-
Interesting and tragic.
Yes, it is, but I mean, a lot of Nazi activists
of the early period, especially associated
with the stormtroopers were gay,
including very importantly,
(36:15):
the commander of the stormtroopers,
a man named Ernst Röhm,
who was actually pretty openly gay,
which was not very usual in that time.
And Hitler was totally okay with it.
I often find this quite interesting.
A man who's just burning with every hatred there is.
The one hatred Hitler really seems not to have had
is the hatred that almost anybody
in the 1920s and 30s had.
(36:37):
I mean, the homophobia of course was
kind of the norm in those days.
Hitler really didn't.
When, before he came to power,
when the stormtroopers were criticized
for having a lot of gay men in them,
Hitler sort of blew it off and he said,
I'm literally quoting here, he said,
look, the stormtroopers are a bunch of rough fighters.
It's not a finishing school for upper class girls.
(36:57):
So like, chill, don't worry about it.
He only cared when it became politically expedient
for him to get rid of Ernst Röhm
because Röhm was causing other political problems for him.
And so then it's kind of like,
you know, the line in Casablanca, I'm shocked,
shocked to find that my stormtroopers are all gay.
And so then he had them murdered.
And then after that, the persecution really ramped up
(37:18):
and gay men start getting sent to concentration camps
and so on and so on.
But it was instrumental for Hitler, not,
it wasn't like his anti-Semitism
that was like quite intense.
It needs to be said that with Donald Trump,
I, similarly, is very agnostic to lesbian and gay issues.
(37:44):
I believe he even came out in the 80s
in support of gay marriage.
Ron Santis in the primary against him,
ran a lot of attack ads about him being
not a cultural war and gay issues.
So that is a really interesting point that this homophobia
was more about a political convenience
(38:04):
than some part of an ideology.
Yep, yeah.
We could go hours here.
So I wanna wrap it up.
I wanna looking ahead, I think that the past month
and beyond that, but the American people are very,
(38:26):
very hungry for information and guidance
and what should they be focusing their energy on
to resist further backsliding of our democracy
and the rule of law and that this,
that we do not descend further down this road.
We've talked about elections,
but let's end on a hopeful note as to what,
(38:47):
what do you really think those concerned about this
who take this seriously, list to this conversation,
the best use of their time and energy in the year ahead
and the years ahead?
You know, I think there is a lot that all of us can do.
I mean, one of the most basic and easy things,
but I think effective things you can do is
(39:07):
get on the phone to your Congress people and your senators
and say, I'm concerned about this.
And I have heard that members of Congress
weigh phone calls fairly heavily
because often people are reluctant to do that.
I've been doing that a lot.
I'm sure that my senators in particular are probably,
or their staff are getting tired of hearing about this
(39:27):
or of hearing from me, but be that as it may.
And then, you know, get involved in whatever you can do.
You know, I mean, I think,
I've heard a lot of people say, and I think it's right,
that one thing we can do is try to sort of build
local networks of solidarity
on whatever issue it is that is close to your heart.
You know, I'll give you an example,
something that I think was actually quite effective.
There are these cards going around, you know,
(39:48):
folks have probably heard about them,
the cards that explain the rights that you have,
you know, if you're a, especially an undocumented
or even documented immigrant and ICE comes to your door,
there are cards explaining what your constitutional rights are,
the cards are often in many languages.
And, you know, my wife, for instance,
got a whole bunch printed up and laminated
and then went around to businesses in the neighborhood
(40:10):
where we live, which is in Jackson Heights, Queens,
which is a very diverse and, you know, immigrant oriented
neighborhood and she passed these cards out
to people in the businesses that said,
if these are useful to you, please give them to people.
And she said, the response was really, really touching
because people were really appreciative and, you know,
and I think that is a practical way that can help.
I think we've seen, you know, in the first few weeks
(40:32):
when there were situations where, you know, ICE officials,
you know, I saw they went to a school in Chicago, for instance,
and people said, well, if you don't have a warrant,
sorry, we're not laying in, you need a signed judicial warrant.
I mean, this kind of stuff can be effective.
Anything that can sort of, I think,
let the powers to be know that we're here
and that we don't like everything that's happening.
So, you know, join an organization, do something.
(40:57):
The main thing we need to do is sort of multiply our voice.
You know, one voice alone doesn't do much,
but if you join up with an organization
and start to build networks, then the voices multiply.
And the more we have that, the more we have, you know,
social connections and so on, the more I think we will have
a vibrant social culture that can keep a democracy going.
(41:17):
Yeah, as a former Chief of Staff for a member of Congress,
these calls matter, even if you're elected official,
is a Democrat, your senator is a Democrat,
and you, it's, we prepare reports every week
and here are the five things that people are writing in about.
Here's what they're saying.
So I definitely encourage that.
(41:38):
And then I want to end on, you know, democracy first,
our mission is to preserve these core principles of democracy,
to continue free for elections as our opportunity
as citizens to have accountability.
So, you know, we've talked a lot today about a population
in a country that lost their ability to have elections
(42:01):
and to hold their leaders accountable.
So, you know, I think that maybe it doesn't, you said,
but voting vote and make sure that we have that ability
for the years to come.
Thank you so much, Ben, for giving us this time,
for sharing your wisdom and insights.
(42:23):
And we look forward to being in this fight with you
for the time ahead.
It's not going away.
Yeah, thank you, Dern. It's always a pleasure to-
excited to be joined today by Professor Benjamin Carter-Hett.
(00:05):
Ben is a professor of history at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
He is also one of the leading experts
and historians on the rise of Nazism in Germany
in the fall of the Weimar Republic.
His recent books on the topic include
(00:26):
The Death of Democracy, Hitler's Rite
and the Last to Power in the Downfall of the Weimar Republic.
So it's really one of the leading experts
to learn from in this moment where authoritarianism
and fascism feel so creeping into our politics
and we fight to make sure we can preserve democracy
and the rule of law.
(00:47):
So Ben, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks Jordan.
I'm delighted to be with you.
To start, the last time we spoke was before the election.
I wanted to get your immediate reactions to this outcome
(01:09):
and how you're thinking about it as a historian.
Interesting question.
I mean, my immediate reaction on a human level was gloom.
As a historian, I guess it's gloom tempered
with a little bit of, I don't know, historical background.
(01:32):
Given what I write about, people always
ask me about parallels between 1933 in Germany and now.
And there are some, I think, slight parallels.
I don't think they're strong.
In terms of what we've seen in the early weeks of Trump's
second administration, the strongest parallel
(01:53):
seems to me his treatment of the federal government
and the federal civil service.
One of the first things that the Nazis did when they came
into power was they passed a law with a very long name
that was called the law for the reform of the professional
civil service, which basically gave them the legal tool
to remake what was essentially the German federal government,
(02:13):
Germany is a federal state like the United States.
So the national government level government departments
could be remade so the Nazis could fire people they didn't
like and hire people they did like.
They had basically two categories that particularly
would lead you to be dismissed.
One's, I think, intuitively obvious.
If they deemed you to be Jewish, you would be fired.
The other, there was a kind of long phrase
(02:35):
that went basically if your record indicates
you won't stand up for the nationalist state,
then you would be fired.
That basically translated meant if you
were a liberal social Democrat, something
like that, liberal left or center right,
even you would be fired.
So they very quickly reshaped the federal government
to be something that was a more useful tool for them.
(02:58):
And this sounds, I think, a fair bit of resonance
with what's happening with Elon Musk and Doge.
Other than that, I think the parallels so far at least
are not overwhelmingly strong.
One of the first things he did as president
was part in the January 6th insurrectionists.
(03:22):
And I think it's important to distinguish here
that in the campaign, he did indicate he wanted to do this,
but he also left voters with the impression
that it would be nonviolent offenders.
And it included individuals that had never really
been in our imagination that could be pardoned,
specifically Stuart Rhodes and Enrique Torres, who
(03:46):
were actually not even there on January 6th.
They had already been arrested by the FBI,
both for facing decades in prison,
for conspiring to overturn the government.
They were charged with essentially political terrorism.
And again, they weren't in the wrong place,
(04:07):
wrong time.
These people were not even actually
allowed to be there because of their criminality.
To me, there is no appetite with the public for what
he has done in making those pardons.
And it remains one of the most unpopular things
he has done as president.
So it seems that he's doing it for power and control
(04:29):
and an endorsement of political violence.
But if you could talk about how you interpret those pardons
and what it says about political violence
and the role that political violence had in the rise
of Nazism.
Sure.
Well, Trump has a bit of a track record
with, I think, recognizing that people
like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and the 3%ers
(04:53):
and so on are a possible reservoir of strength for him,
including in events like January 6th
or some future January 6th type scenario.
So I definitely think that there is an element here,
a little bit like in the 2020 campaign when
he said in the debate, stand back but stand by.
(05:14):
There's a little bit of, I think,
consciously keeping those people in reserve
should there come a time when having people like that
at his side is useful.
The parallel here to the things that I write about
is that the Nazis famously had their paramilitary forces known
(05:34):
by a number of names known technically as the storm
sections, informally as storm troopers or brownshirts.
This was a paramilitary force that the Nazis could use,
basically to inflict violence on their opponents
and to gain control of politically key territory,
like key neighborhoods in Berlin or Hamburg
or other major cities.
And again, there is a loose, I want
(05:56):
to stress, loose analogy between groups
like the Proud Boys and the Nazi brownshirts.
It's loose in part because the numbers
are much, much different.
When by the time Hitler came to power,
there were about 3 million, mostly young men,
in the Nazi brownshirts.
And considered as a proportion of a nation of 65 million,
(06:18):
that's vastly more than anything in the American paramilitary
groups.
So in that sense, the parallel is loose.
But the thinking in terms of how you can use people like this
as a political tool, including the use of political violence
as a political tool, and not just to gain control
but also for its propaganda values,
all of that is a bit of a rough parallel between how
(06:41):
I think Trump thinks about these things
and how they worked in early 1930s Germany.
And to think about 1930s Germany, correct me here,
but the first election that Nazis really had traction
was in 1930, is that right?
And then there were subsequent elections.
(07:06):
The more ambitious right wing legislation and policies,
was that after the 33 election?
Or can you help us understand the timeline here?
And I think it's important to know that there were elections
once the Nazis had actually gained
power before they stopped them.
There was one basically.
There was one kind of semi free election
(07:28):
after Hitler had come into office as chancellor.
And you're quite right.
There was this sort of blizzard of elections in the early 1930s.
The details can get confusing, but there
were a lot of elections at both national and state level,
with the basic narrative being the Nazis gained quite rapidly
in support until they hit a line of about a third
of the electorate, which they never
(07:48):
improved on in a free election.
The last fully free election was in November 1932,
at which the Nazis got a third or so of the vote.
That made them the biggest party by a fair margin,
because the next biggest party had about 20%.
But still, it's a third of the vote.
They're nowhere near a majority.
Then for various complicated reasons,
Hitler was nonetheless offered the chancellorship,
(08:09):
and he was brought into office as chancellor
with a coalition cabinet in which only two other out of 11
people were Nazis.
The rest were kind of establishment conservatives.
But then right away, they move into another election campaign,
because Hitler thought correctly that as an incumbent,
he could improve on his previous election outcomes.
And so there was an election in March 1933, early March.
(08:32):
And here the Nazis, they did do better.
They got about 43% of the votes, still not a majority,
but they're best showing.
But that was a semi-free election,
because the Nazis were doing all kinds of things by then.
They were arresting opponents in very large numbers,
especially after a week before the election.
There was the famous event of the Reichstag fire,
after which they proclaimed an emergency decree, which
(08:54):
gave them limitless arrest power.
So they were arresting thousands of their opponents.
They were shutting down opposition newspapers.
They had control of the radio, so they could use the radio,
and they could exclude opponents from the radio.
They could use the police to break up rallies and speeches
and meetings of other parties.
So it's not a fully free election.
But even in those circumstances, the Nazis still,
(09:16):
they had hoped for a majority, and they still didn't get it.
They got, as I said, 43%.
Their coalition partners, the kind of main right of center,
traditional conservative party, with them
they had a bare majority of 51%.
And then, as you said, quite rightly,
then after that come most of the main steps
(09:36):
of the Nazis' consolidation of power.
The only thing really before that March election
was the Reichstag fire and the famous Reichstag fire decree,
which, as I said, gave the Nazis limitless arrest
power and various other things, including, very importantly,
the ability to take over state governments
within the German Federation.
But then the other big things come after,
the thing we talked about before of taking
over the civil service.
(09:58):
They got a law through the parliament, the Reichstag,
called the Enabling Act, by which the parliament basically
gave Hitler's cabinet all of its lawmaking powers
for four years.
So at that point, Hitler really is effectively a dictator.
That comes after the election.
And then they move very quickly.
They outlaw every other political party except the Nazis.
They outlaw free labor unions, any kind of media outlet
(10:20):
that as opposed to them gets shut down.
So within a few months, really by July of 1933,
this process is complete and Hitler is very squarely
in dictatorial control.
So the process took under a half year.
So Ben, would you say that it is true that there were moments
where the Reichstag and the elected assembly
(10:44):
could have used their authority to stop this,
but really what they ended up is passing legislation that
ceded their power and authority to this individual?
That's exactly right.
When Hitler got that enabling act at the end of March 1933,
he had to convince the basically the sort of centrist parties
(11:06):
to go along with him.
And they did.
They were sort of partly kind of bribed and partly
intimidated into going along.
They didn't have to do that.
The sort of mainstream liberal and conservative parties,
they were all quite small by this point
and didn't have a lot of seats.
More importantly, there was a party called the Center, which
(11:26):
was a party purely for German Catholics.
And it still had a substantial presence in the Reichstag.
It's voted held up.
And the Center was convinced to vote for the enabling act.
Again, partly sort of bribed with promises of good treatment
for the Catholic Church and partly intimidated.
If the center hadn't gone along with it,
then the enabling act wouldn't have got the votes it needed
to pass.
(11:47):
It was a constitutional amendment which needed a 2-thirds vote.
And they wouldn't have gotten the 2-thirds vote.
So yes, absolutely.
They could have done more to stop it.
But in the whole sort of atmosphere, partly fear
and partly sort of promises, they took the path of least
resistance and gave Hitler what he wanted.
(12:11):
So it's sort of thinking about ways
that history could have gone differently.
I think it's very obvious that voters, if the public had
recognized the threat and not elected the Nazis,
but also that the assembly, the Reichstag, had not done that.
What other things jump out to you that
(12:33):
are these inflection points, these forks in the road,
actually, to use an Elon Musk subject line
for laying off federal employees, that we should look for.
We should think about.
Hitler would not have gotten anywhere
if powerful established elites had not, in a sense,
(12:54):
invited him into power.
To be chancellor in the German system,
this is still true today, you have
to be asked by the president to become chancellor
and to form a cabinet.
And the president at that time, separately elected
by the people, was the celebrated World War
1 military supreme commander, Field Marshal Paul von
(13:16):
Hindenburg, who didn't like Hitler
and didn't like the Nazis, but was persuaded
to choose Hitler chancellor.
To some extent, this is clearer now from recent research,
to some extent by considerable efforts by the Nazis
to basically threaten him and blackmail him.
There were some kind of scandals floating around Hindenburg.
(13:39):
And the Nazis basically said, we will impeach you.
There is an impeachment.
There was an impeachment mechanism in the Vivermark
Constitution, kind of like ours.
They said, we will impeach you over these scandals
if you don't do this.
And Hindenburg, really on the basis of that,
seems to have turned around quite quickly
within a few days in January 1933 and agreed to name Hitler
as chancellor.
(13:59):
If Hindenburg hadn't done that, Hindenburg
had no path to getting to the chancellorship that
didn't run through Hindenburg.
So there's that.
And in a broader sense, the people are right.
Just to wait, I just understand that, Ben.
So whether it was corruption or infidelity,
but it was used as a way of blackmailing Hindenburg.
(14:24):
This is, to be honest, this is somewhat speculative.
This is a conclusion that a lot of historians,
including me, have reached on sort of looking at the evidence.
Particularly, there were sort of tax scandals about what
Hindenburg had done with his estate that
made him vulnerable to this.
And then there is sort of circumstantial evidence
(14:45):
that the Nazis were using this to threaten him
with impeachment if he didn't make Hitler a chancellor.
And in a sort of broader way, a lot of the people around
Hindenburg, his advisors, who were generally senior military
men, there were also people in that milieu who
were senior business leaders.
(15:05):
They all calculated, and here, just to make this clear,
here is where I think there's a bit of an analogy to our politics
over the last decade in the United States.
These were what you might call establishment Republicans,
in a sense, who knew that their agenda of building up
the armed forces and reducing the bite of the regulatory state
(15:27):
on business, that didn't have traction in the electorate.
And so they needed an electoral base
if they wanted to do what they wanted to do.
And here's Hitler and the Nazis, who now have the biggest
electoral base in the country.
It's not an electoral base for the established elite
or its agenda, but it is an electoral base
that is nationalist, pro-military certainly,
(15:47):
very certainly anti-communist.
So the elites think, two-thirds, kind of usable.
We can maybe do business with this guy in his party.
We can probably manipulate him because they
don't have a high opinion of Hitler
who doesn't seem sophisticated or educated or experienced.
He's not an aristocratic leader the way these established
gentlemen are.
(16:09):
So they think they can manipulate him.
Hitler, for his part, understands
that the path to power is through them.
So they're kind of using each other.
And here I think there is a fairly close analogy
to establishment Republicans and MAGA Republicans.
And of course, the outcome of the story
is Hitler and his people succeed in using the establishment
(16:29):
as the gateway into power.
And then quite quickly turn on the establishment
and basically kind of run them out of town.
And again, within a few months, the establishment conservatives
are kind of wringing their hands and thinking, oh my god,
what have we done?
Because it has gotten away from them.
They learned too late that they had underestimated Hitler's
ability to grab power and his ruthlessness
(16:49):
and how he could grab power.
At the start of this conversation,
we talked about sort of the parallel around doge.
And they very quickly have taken over the Department of Justice
and politicized it also with Kash Batel being
(17:10):
confirmed to be FBI director.
We've seen, I think, for those of us
that are very concerned about the rule of law,
what has been going on with the mayor of New York City,
Eric Adams, where this seems like they are using these charges
(17:31):
as a way of controlling the mayor.
But Ed Martin, who's now the attorney for the District
of Columbia, that was a lawyer for January 6,
insurrectionists, has withheld waiting for indication
from the White House certain charges.
(17:51):
So it seems like we're looking at that behavior
and the politicization of the Department of Justice.
How do you see those actions?
Again, that marks in some ways a parallel to the German
experience of the 30s.
In some ways, Trump has gone farther with that
than the Nazis did, at least in the earlier phases.
(18:15):
The parallel is closer with the police.
The Nazis were very quick to get the police under their control.
One of the first things, or actually,
pretty much the first thing they did.
And when I mentioned that in Hitler's first cabinet,
only two other people were Nazis.
But one of those was very key.
It was a man who became quite infamous later on,
Hermann Goetting, who had a lot of jobs in Nazi Germany,
(18:36):
including head of the Air Force.
But his first big job was to be interior minister
of the state of Prussia, the state of Prussia being,
at that time, 2 thirds of Germany in both land and population.
And Prussia had its own police force, about 50,000 men.
And as interior minister, Goetting had control
of that police force.
(18:57):
So putting Goetting and Nazi in control of the Prussian police
was a very big deal, which the Nazis used utterly ruthlessly
to, as I was saying before, arrest opponents
and crack down on the opposition.
And they actually then drafted their own paramilitaries.
Whoops, sorry about that.
They drafted their own paramilitaries into the police.
(19:17):
So the stormtroopers become kind of like honorary police
officers.
And you can imagine how that goes.
Oddly enough, at the sort of level of the Department
of Justice, so to speak, the German, the Reich Justice
Ministry, had for the first eight years
that Hitler was in power, a pretty establishment figure
as minister of justice, who, within the limits of what
(19:39):
you could do in Hitler's regime, ran things fairly straight.
The sort of corruption of the courts and the legal system
as such was actually rather slow in Nazi Germany compared
to what happened with the police.
You wrote an op-ed in the LA Times
with a fellow historian Ruth Ben-Gaet, who's
(20:01):
an expert specifically on the rise of Mussolini and Italy,
on taking seriously the threat that Trump proposed
in the last election of not having
free and fair elections anymore.
Talk a bit about that concern you had taking seriously
this threat, because it, I think,
(20:22):
is a really resonant point.
Yeah.
I mean, this is something that Trump says over and over again,
just as lately he's been saying over and over again
that he'd like to run again in 2028, or that he's a king,
or various versions of this.
I wouldn't claim to be, you know,
I'm a historian of Germany.
(20:43):
I'm not a journalist on American politics now.
So my predictions should be taken with all due salt.
But it seems to me, having said that,
I cannot imagine that if he is still reasonably healthy
in 2028, he will leave office unless he's really forced to,
one way or another.
And my biggest, well, my two biggest concerns
(21:06):
worries with this iteration of the Trump administration,
one that sooner or later, American soldiers
will be shooting Americans in demonstrations
on American soil, and two, that we will not
have fully free elections one way or another,
that Trump will do whatever he can to keep us
from having fully free elections.
(21:28):
As Ruth and I said in that piece,
you need to, I think, listen very carefully
when authoritarian types like Trump tell you what they
would like to do, because I think Trump's track record is,
even though he throws some of this stuff out seemingly
off the cuff, he means it.
I mean, whether or not he succeeds in doing it,
he wants to succeed in doing it, and he will try to do it.
(21:48):
So I think we need to be super, super vigilant
about keeping the kind of channels
of our electoral machinery safe.
And as our, in a democracy, our true form of accountability
to that action, I don't think there was really
public polling or opinion surveys in the 30s.
(22:10):
I could be wrong, but how do you have any sense
from your work as to sort of how the population felt
as they were disenfranchised really
throughout the 30s until the end of the war?
Regret, I just sort of, how do people respond to that?
(22:32):
And so.
Yeah, I mean, that's a really interesting question,
and you're right, they didn't have,
I mean, there was opinion polling in the United States
at that time, there wasn't in Germany.
And in a dictatorship, for obvious reasons,
you can't do opinion polling.
However, that being said, there are really interesting sources
on German public opinion under the Nazis.
There are sort of two main ones, especially for the 1930s.
(22:55):
The Social Democratic Party, which was outlawed
and its operatives went into exile,
but the organization sort of operating underground
in Germany did opinion work as much as they could
by sort of talking to people, and they put together reports.
And we have those reports of what the Social Democrats
thought people were thinking.
And then from the other side, even more amazingly,
(23:16):
the Nazi security services did as sophisticated opinion
research as you could do in that environment.
They would do things like they would send undercover police
officers basically to like bars and working class areas,
and they would sit around in the bars
and they would strike up a conversation and say
to some guy in overalls in a tool belt, hey, man,
what do you think of what the Fuhrer is doing?
(23:37):
And they would write it all down.
And these two, they've been published.
You can read them.
They're fascinating, because they actually
gave a lot of bad news to Hitler and the leaders.
Always carefully sandwiched.
These reports, there's a formula to them.
I've read a lot of these things.
The approach is paragraph one.
Everybody loves the Fuhrer.
Things are going great.
(23:58):
Germans are loving what's happening.
Paragraph two, well, there are a few people kind of unhappy
with the shortages of potatoes and meat,
and there's been a lot of grumbling about this.
And then they would sort of give the bad news,
and then they end up saying, but in the end,
everybody loves the Fuhrer.
So it's how you do this in a highly authoritarian state.
If you sort of boil this all down,
(24:19):
we do know historians of Nazi Germany,
we do actually know quite a bit about the sort of arc
of public opinion.
And what I think is interesting and maybe for us important
is the arc follows what I might call kind of predictable
contours, and it has kind of predictable reactions, which
are not unlike even in these first six weeks or so of Trump
(24:42):
to what we've seen.
I.e. in particular, it's economic issues
that are going to get people.
And if people feel they're doing well materially,
they'll be probably relatively OK with things.
If they feel they're not, they'll be relatively not OK.
And one thing we know for instance
is that in the first year Hitler was in power,
his popularity declined quite sharply.
(25:04):
He had a honeymoon.
We're so familiar with this concept.
Hitler had a honeymoon in March, April 1933.
But that honeymoon really chilled off.
And by the spring of 1934, the regime
was quite unpopular because things weren't really
getting better yet economically.
And there were other things too.
People were unhappy with the storm troopers who were around,
(25:24):
and they were getting bored, and they were inflicting violence
on people who weren't sort of in their usual target areas.
And people were quite unhappy about all that.
So by spring, early summer of 34, the regime
knew it's in a bit of a public opinion crisis with people.
And there was that kind of cycle throughout the regime.
And the other thing we know is that then in the 30s,
(25:44):
as the economy got better and employment got better,
Hitler's popularity rose.
And then towards the end of the 1930s,
as I'm sure a lot of folks will know,
he had some diplomatic successes in a sense,
getting control of Austria and then getting control
of part of Czechoslovakia, a sort of threatening war,
but ultimately doing it without war.
And Germans were quite thrilled about that.
One famous historian has written that if Hitler had
(26:07):
died in late 1938, people would have forgotten
about the concentration camps, which there were already
at that time.
And they forget about the oppression and everything
else.
And he would be revered as the greatest German statesman ever
because he brought Austria and Germany together
and the German parts of Czechoslovakia together and so on.
So this guy writes basically darn, just six years separated
(26:29):
him from that.
Because last year, was that author?
The author is a German named Joachim Fest.
He was a high-end journalist.
He wrote for the paper, the Frankfurt Algemann Zeitung.
And he wrote a big biography of Hitler.
I would just put it in the war comes.
And the war, especially as the war turned nasty
for the Germans after 1942 or so,
(26:50):
the popularity of the regime really went downhill.
And although Hitler's popularity itself actually
held up pretty well, the common reaction the Germans had
was, oh, the Fuhrer doesn't know.
Things are terrible, but people are keeping the knowledge
from him.
He would fix it if he knew.
You know, I actually just wanted to pivot to the economy.
It's a great point.
(27:13):
There are certain decisions specifically around tariffs,
but others that economists say, like,
there's not really a way that this will not have,
will not result in increased prices at every level
or on inflation for regular consumers,
the positive building and other things.
(27:33):
You know, were there policies that they were pushing
when they took power that were trying
to appeal to a certain political base?
In Trump's case, you know, Rust Belt union workers
or other people that have lost jobs because of free trade
deals, was there any examples to point to like that?
(28:01):
In a rough sort of way, yes.
The policies were probably, in a way,
more strategic about how they handled that than Trump.
I mean, one of the things that I think
is quite amazing about Trump is, I mean, I completely agree.
And I mean, I'm not an economist,
but from everything I read from economists,
these tariffs are just going to be disastrous for ordinary people
(28:21):
and for inflation.
And Trump's clearly not sort of thoughtful about it
because he keeps introducing them and then pulling them back
and introducing them and pulling them back.
And that doesn't speak to a very systematic thought process.
The Nazis were a lot more systematic.
I mean, Heather was very clear on what he wanted.
He wanted an economy that could produce a lot of weapons.
He wanted to really build up, you know,
(28:42):
in a sense, the military industrial complex, if you will.
And he had a very smart central banker and economics minister,
very eminent man named Helmar Schacht.
And Schacht knew how to do this.
And so in a sense, to achieve what Hitler wanted,
the economic policy was good.
(29:03):
And it took a little while, but it did happen.
And we know that it was the rearmament drive that really
fueled the economy in the 1930s.
So that by 1937, 1938, Germany has fully recovered
from the Great Depression, quite different from the United
States in that time, by the way.
They had hit full employment and the economy is just
(29:23):
ticking along.
They're actually starting to get inflationary worries
because the economy is ticking along so well.
So I don't think, I mean, Hitler did not
so much have the kind of self-defeating
and somewhat irrational policies that, at least so far,
we've seen from Trump.
The problem was, I mean, ultimately,
that the economy he was creating was
(29:45):
an economy for military production
and not for civilian consumption.
And so ordinary people did not get the benefits out of it
that they could have.
What we know is that full employment returned,
but wages did not rise.
So people were doing a little better because they had jobs,
but they weren't doing better because wages went up.
Because basically, the wages were sort of confiscated
(30:07):
by the regime to pay for our commitments.
Want to shift to foreign policy here.
We're, Trump coming into office has done very drastically
and quickly changed the US's position in the world
on foreign policy specifically around Ukraine,
(30:28):
seemingly aligning us, the United States with Russia,
over Ukraine.
Give us your interpretation of this,
but also when the Nazis took power,
was there a change in foreign policy
or in alignment with Italy and other countries?
(30:51):
Was that going on, on an international level?
Yes, although more slowly than we've seen it here.
When Hitler came to power, I mean, in foreign policy terms,
he comes to power in a vastly different context.
He comes to power in a context where Germany is very weak,
both economically and militarily.
And Hitler knew this, and he didn't
(31:12):
want to provoke trouble too soon.
So he was very careful.
Early on, a few months into being in power,
he gave a big speech about peace that all Germany wanted
his peace, and they weren't going to threaten their neighbors.
One of his early moves was to sign a non-aggression treaty
with Poland to reassure the Poles and to bolster
(31:35):
that relationship.
He was quite concerned to cultivate
good relations with the British, and he
spent a lot of effort in the 30s trying to do that.
Of course, there was a gradual shift,
and he did eventually line up with Italy,
although that didn't happen fast.
Italy was still, having been on the side of the British
(31:55):
and French in World War I, Italy was still
a bit of a swing seed, if you will.
And as late as 1935, in what's called the Strese Front,
there were efforts by the British and the French
to get Italy to line up with them against Germany.
It was actually Italy's attack on Ethiopia
(32:16):
in those days, Abyssinia, in 1935,
and the fact that the British and French came out
against that, but Germany was sympathetic.
That's what starts the process of Italy kind of then
moving into the German orbit, or maybe Germany
moving into the Italian orbit at that time
would be a better way to phrase it.
So there is a diplomatic alignment,
and there is a diplomatic alignment a little bit
like what we are seeing right now in the sense of moving
(32:39):
into a kind of authoritarian front,
but it happened much more slowly with Hitler.
There's nothing like this, like a few weeks
that we've seen decades, if not more than decades,
of American foreign policy being turned on its head.
It's alarmingly fast.
(32:59):
I want to turn to the flow of information and propaganda
and how Hitler demonized most notably Jewish people,
but other LGBTQ, however they would have referred to them,
Roma, other people groups.
(33:21):
But the minority, they have one commonality,
which is they were minorities.
And it seems that also that the anti-Semitism
was very connected to immigration,
that there was a flow of immigration.
Can you talk about what the demonization of that people
(33:42):
group, how that played into their propaganda
and the overall political movement they had?
Sure.
So one of the things that is striking, I think,
about German politics in the 20s and early 30s,
to your point about immigration, is that,
and this sounds very familiar, control of the border
(34:04):
was a very big political deal before the Nazis came to power.
And the border they were talking about
was the border with Poland, the new border, of course,
after World War I. And Germany did not
have the military or police manpower
to control flows of refugees across that border.
And because of the Russian Revolution and Civil War
and other things going on east of Germany,
(34:24):
there were huge flows of people across that border, hundreds
of thousands in the 20s, of which an estimated,
I believe the figure is an estimated 80,000 or so,
were Jews from what had become Poland
or what is now Russia and was then becoming the Soviet Union.
The terms and borders are complicated.
And the Jews who were coming from Eastern Europe into Germany
(34:47):
were conspicuous to most Germans, because prior to that,
German Jews had been pretty assimilated.
And for the most part, the German Jews community
was tiny as a shared population.
But they were also very assimilated,
identified heavily with Germany, would have dressed
as any other German did and sort of lived and worked
as any other German did.
And they were sort of semi-invisible.
(35:09):
The Jews that start coming in from Eastern Europe
after World War I are very conspicuous.
They're often Orthodox and they dress differently
and they look differently and they speak differently
and they're very conspicuous.
And so this starts to fuel the sort of linked issues
of border control and visibly different people coming in,
sort of flow together.
And they're a gift really to Nazi propaganda,
(35:32):
especially of course, anti-Semitic propaganda.
With the other groups you mentioned, it's interesting.
The Nazis do end up, of course, massively persecuting
and basically murdering LGBTQ people
and the Sinti and Roma and other people
with handicaps and groups like that.
All of that comes later though.
(35:54):
And the LGBTQ issue is actually particularly interesting,
well, specifically the gay men issue
is particularly interesting because-
Interesting and tragic.
Yes, it is, but I mean, a lot of Nazi activists
of the early period, especially associated
with the stormtroopers were gay,
including very importantly,
(36:15):
the commander of the stormtroopers,
a man named Ernst Röhm,
who was actually pretty openly gay,
which was not very usual in that time.
And Hitler was totally okay with it.
I often find this quite interesting.
A man who's just burning with every hatred there is.
The one hatred Hitler really seems not to have had
is the hatred that almost anybody
in the 1920s and 30s had.
(36:37):
I mean, the homophobia of course was
kind of the norm in those days.
Hitler really didn't.
When, before he came to power,
when the stormtroopers were criticized
for having a lot of gay men in them,
Hitler sort of blew it off and he said,
I'm literally quoting here, he said,
look, the stormtroopers are a bunch of rough fighters.
It's not a finishing school for upper class girls.
(36:57):
So like, chill, don't worry about it.
He only cared when it became politically expedient
for him to get rid of Ernst Röhm
because Röhm was causing other political problems for him.
And so then it's kind of like,
you know, the line in Casablanca, I'm shocked,
shocked to find that my stormtroopers are all gay.
And so then he had them murdered.
And then after that, the persecution really ramped up
(37:18):
and gay men start getting sent to concentration camps
and so on and so on.
But it was instrumental for Hitler, not,
it wasn't like his anti-Semitism
that was like quite intense.
It needs to be said that with Donald Trump,
I, similarly, is very agnostic to lesbian and gay issues.
(37:44):
I believe he even came out in the 80s
in support of gay marriage.
Ron Santis in the primary against him,
ran a lot of attack ads about him being
not a cultural war and gay issues.
So that is a really interesting point that this homophobia
was more about a political convenience
(38:04):
than some part of an ideology.
Yep, yeah.
We could go hours here.
So I wanna wrap it up.
I wanna looking ahead, I think that the past month
and beyond that, but the American people are very,
(38:26):
very hungry for information and guidance
and what should they be focusing their energy on
to resist further backsliding of our democracy
and the rule of law and that this,
that we do not descend further down this road.
We've talked about elections,
but let's end on a hopeful note as to what,
(38:47):
what do you really think those concerned about this
who take this seriously, list to this conversation,
the best use of their time and energy in the year ahead
and the years ahead?
You know, I think there is a lot that all of us can do.
I mean, one of the most basic and easy things,
but I think effective things you can do is
(39:07):
get on the phone to your Congress people and your senators
and say, I'm concerned about this.
And I have heard that members of Congress
weigh phone calls fairly heavily
because often people are reluctant to do that.
I've been doing that a lot.
I'm sure that my senators in particular are probably,
or their staff are getting tired of hearing about this
(39:27):
or of hearing from me, but be that as it may.
And then, you know, get involved in whatever you can do.
You know, I mean, I think,
I've heard a lot of people say, and I think it's right,
that one thing we can do is try to sort of build
local networks of solidarity
on whatever issue it is that is close to your heart.
You know, I'll give you an example,
something that I think was actually quite effective.
There are these cards going around, you know,
(39:48):
folks have probably heard about them,
the cards that explain the rights that you have,
you know, if you're a, especially an undocumented
or even documented immigrant and ICE comes to your door,
there are cards explaining what your constitutional rights are,
the cards are often in many languages.
And, you know, my wife, for instance,
got a whole bunch printed up and laminated
and then went around to businesses in the neighborhood
(40:10):
where we live, which is in Jackson Heights, Queens,
which is a very diverse and, you know, immigrant oriented
neighborhood and she passed these cards out
to people in the businesses that said,
if these are useful to you, please give them to people.
And she said, the response was really, really touching
because people were really appreciative and, you know,
and I think that is a practical way that can help.
I think we've seen, you know, in the first few weeks
(40:32):
when there were situations where, you know, ICE officials,
you know, I saw they went to a school in Chicago, for instance,
and people said, well, if you don't have a warrant,
sorry, we're not laying in, you need a signed judicial warrant.
I mean, this kind of stuff can be effective.
Anything that can sort of, I think,
let the powers to be know that we're here
and that we don't like everything that's happening.
So, you know, join an organization, do something.
(40:57):
The main thing we need to do is sort of multiply our voice.
You know, one voice alone doesn't do much,
but if you join up with an organization
and start to build networks, then the voices multiply.
And the more we have that, the more we have, you know,
social connections and so on, the more I think we will have
a vibrant social culture that can keep a democracy going.
(41:17):
Yeah, as a former Chief of Staff for a member of Congress,
these calls matter, even if you're elected official,
is a Democrat, your senator is a Democrat,
and you, it's, we prepare reports every week
and here are the five things that people are writing in about.
Here's what they're saying.
So I definitely encourage that.
(41:38):
And then I want to end on, you know, democracy first,
our mission is to preserve these core principles of democracy,
to continue free for elections as our opportunity
as citizens to have accountability.
So, you know, we've talked a lot today about a population
in a country that lost their ability to have elections
(42:01):
and to hold their leaders accountable.
So, you know, I think that maybe it doesn't, you said,
but voting vote and make sure that we have that ability
for the years to come.
Thank you so much, Ben, for giving us this time,
for sharing your wisdom and insights.
(42:23):
And we look forward to being in this fight with you
for the time ahead.
It's not going away.
Yeah, thank you, Dern. It's always a pleasure to-
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