I’ve been watching series 1 of the BBC documentary Rise of The Nazis, first broadcast in 2019 and covering Hitler’s accession to power in 1933. The three episodes are available HERE on iplayer. What surprised me was how many disturbing parallels there are to recent events in America. The German president at the time was Paul von Hindenburg, an aristocratic Prussian and Chief of the General Staff in the First World War. Like Trump, he was a man without any real political ethos and thought pliable and easily manipulated by those around him.
But Trump is also similar to Hitler who was a notoriously lazy man, often not rising until lunchtime, totally uninterested in the minutiae of government but who valued personal loyalty to him above all else. Trump spends most of his time on the golf course. Both of them were masters at playing people off against each other and were given to delivering long rants in private rather than developing detailed policies.
The documentary shows how flimsy democracy is in reality. At base, it depends on those involved in it respecting the constitution, law, precedent, and the legal niceties. Trump as we know thinks he's above the law and he routinely ignores the US Constitution. Hitler managed to dismantle Germany’s democratic institutions and gather all the power of the state into his own hands in a little more than a year. Most of the real work being dreamt up and carried out by his underlings, Goring and Himmler, to outdo each other in gaining favour with the Furher.
In 1932 Germany was in turmoil with deadlock in the Reichstag, high inflation and massive unemployment plus a simmering resentment against the Versailles treaty they were forced to sign at the end of the Great War. There was a lot of maneuvering by men like Kurt Von Schleicher and Franz Von Papen of the old elite to keep the Communists out of power. Germany had the largest Communist party outside Russia in the early 1930s.
In present-day America, the GOP regularly accuse their Democrat opponents and the 'deep state' of being a hot-bed of Marxism.
Schleicher and Von Papen persuaded Hindenburg to appoint Hitler at the end of January 1933, with Von Papen as Vice-chancellor, thinking they could control the Austrian firebrand. Weeks later on 23 February Hitler had passed the infamous Enabling Act allowing him to rule by decree. A year later, in June 1934, we had the night of the long knives when about a hundred people who were believed to be enemies of the regime, including Von Schleicher himself, were murdered on Hitler’s orders.
What nobody had appreciated before it was too late, was just how ruthless Hitler and his supporters were prepared to be. The 86-year-old Hindenberg died in August, Hitler declared himself president and chancellor and that was it, a madman was in total control.
In the beginning, Heinrich Himmler was merely Munich's Chief of Police. He created the SS simply as 'auxiliaries' to the Bavarian state police. He also built a camp to house dissidents for 're-education' purposes in the small town of Dachau, just outside Munich, again on his own initiative before he became part of the regime.
Compare this to Tom Homan, Trump's choice for a border Czar, who has announced that he intends to build "detention facilities" or "open-air campuses" designed for families of detained illegal immigrants to the USA.
Herman Goring initiated his 'Research Bureau' to wiretap Hitler's opponents and industrialists and gather information to blackmail them into doing his bidding. Trump is about to appoint the loyalist Kash Patel to head up the FBI with its extensive files on the Washington elite. Goring, it should be recalled, also created the Gestapo although Himmler later took control of it.
Elon Musk is not that different to Ernst Rohm, an old colleague of Hitler from the 1920s, who built an army of stormtroopers to bring violence and mayhem to the streets of Germany. In 1934 he had four million men under his command! Musk has 200 million Twitter followers and the world's deepest pockets. And like Steve Bannon, another Trump devotee, Rohm had nothing but disdain for the messy processes of democracy.
Hitler's regime was always full of disagreements and intrigue. Goring and Himmler hated each other for example. Now look at this tweet by Steve Bannon about Elon Musk:
Steve Bannon called Elon Musk, a “toddler”— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) 28 December 2024 at 07:07
Eventually, Hitler had Ernst Rohm murdered in prison when he became a threat and an embarrassment. If I was Musk I might think about that.
Musk by the way has now written an op-ed for the German Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag endorsing the far-right Neo-Nazi party, the AFD:
Elon Musk publishes a text in the German newspaper "Welt am Sonntag," in which he endorses the far-right AfD for the upcoming federal elections. This man has a global agenda.— Paul Hünermund (@p-hunermund.com) 28 December 2024 at 11:45
The AFD are currently running second in the polls on a policy of the mass deportation of immigrants and a rapprochement with Moscow. A general election is due on 23 February.
These are all lessons from history. We shouldn't ignore them.
