By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH – February 27, 2007
Neither mounting political defeats at home nor continuing
military and diplomatic defeats abroad have slowed down the Georgites in any
way on their inexorable march towards overthrowing US Constitutional democracy
and establishing a fascist state in its stead. In this space, I have frequently
written about the lessons we defenders of US Constitutional Democracy can learn
from the historical experience of prior fascist states, especially that of Nazi
Germany. (Once again, to make sure that readers know what I mean when I
use the term “fascism,” and that I am not simply throwing it around as an
epithet, an exercise that is less than useful, I append my short definition of
it at the end of the column.) Contrariwise in terms of advice-giving,
this column is the first of two about lessons that the US fascists could learn
from Nazi Germany as well; that is if they want to succeed. Not that I
want them to succeed, mind you, but at the rate they are going, they need all
the help they can get.
Hitler and the German Nazi Party took power in Germany on
Jan. 30, 1993 and then kept it right up until the end of the Second World War,
despite the physical and human devastation wreaked on their country first by
Allied bombing and then by the war itself, especially on the Eastern
Front. The Nazis had never been a majority party before Hitler became
Chancellor. The highest percentage that they and Hitler achieved in any
free vote was 39 (May, 1932) and in the last free election, that of November,
1932, their percentage actually declined to 33. But once in power, they
stayed in power. How did they do it?
A variety of historians have offered a variety of reasons
over time, and certain of them have attempted to provide a unitary one, that is
THE reason was this or that. I do not hold to that view, and neither do
many other historians. The conversion of a major capitalist country with
a very well-developed industrial base and a well-educated population of
67,000,000 into the second major fascist power in history was a very complex
event. (Italy was the first major nation that suffered a fascist
revolution, in 1922, although Hungary is considered to have been the very
first, in 1919.) Thus it seems to me that one cannot rely on a single
cause to explain it all.
And so, let us consider that major components of the causal
set, not necessarily in order of importance. First, the Nazi Party was
extremely well-organized and highly disciplined. It was also extremely
well-financed, both from domestic sources and foreign ones as well. (A
great grandfather of George W. Bush, George Herbert Walker, an owner of the
Hamburg-Amerika steamship company and a committed anti-Communist, was an early
funder of Hitler, as was Henry Ford, who was also a passionate
anti-Semite.)
Second, the Nazis had several private armies at their
disposal. The largest, with about 400,000 members, was the
“Sturmabteilung” (the Storm Division), also known as the Brownshirts and the
“SA.” The Nazis also had access to the “Stahlhelm,” a smaller right-wing organization
of street fighters, drawn primarily from World War I veterans. Finally,
in 1925 Hitler organized his own private army, at first simply a private elite
guard for himself and his top lieutenants, called the “Schutzstaffel”
(innocently enough, “Protective Echelon”) or SS. By the early 1930s,
there were 200,000 of them, all of whom took a personal oath of loyalty, not to
the Party, but to Hitler. This latter was the origin of the German Nazi
“Fuehrer Prinzip,” the Leadership Principle that whatever the Leader decides is
right, is right, and must be followed without question (sound familiar?).
Thus the Nazis had their own physical forces, and they used
them, both before and after they took state power, to battle, intimidate,
terrorize, repress, force into exile, murder, and imprison their enemies.
After Hitler took power, he eliminated the semi-independent SA and SH (neither
of which was popular with the Army, whose favor Hitler was strongly
currying). He maintained the SS and established the ”Geheime
Staatspolizei” (Gestapo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). These secret
police agencies, related to the SS through a rather confusing over-lapping
bureaucratic organization and thus bound personally to Hitler by oath, were
primarily responsible for running the domestic terror, a major factor in the
Nazi maintenance of power. They did so through such means as warrantless
searches, arbitrary arrests, denial of habeas corpus and legal representation,
the use of hearsay evidence and anonymous sources, indefinite detention without
trial, and the widespread use of torture (sound familiar?) According to
the testimony of many anti-Nazi Germans who managed to survive the War by
keeping their mouths shut, the Nazi terror was terrorizing and all-pervasive.
A third factor was Hitler’s force of personality, his
messianic vision for Germany, and his personal charisma. Many Germans did
indeed love the man (at least before the war), did see him as the savior of a
Germany that had not only lost World War I but had been humiliated by the
Versailles Treaty forced down its throat by the victorious Allies. The
personality cult of Hitler was begun in the early days of the Party in the
1920s. Once they took power, with Josef Goebbels in command of the
Ministry of Propaganda, it was taken to heights never before achieved
anywhere. Unlike Karl Rove’s Privatized Ministry of Propaganda here,
Goebbels’ was officially part of the government with full government
funding.
The final major factor for Nazi success previously cited was
of course the Nazis’ rampant anti-Semitism. Certainly not all Germans
were anti-Semites. In fact it is likely that only a minority were.
Even fewer likely held to the virulent forms of anti-Semitism promoted by
Hitler and Goebbels in their speeches, their publications, and by their actions
such as the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 that deprived Jews of German citizenship
simply because they were Jews. And fewer too likely held to the notion
that the solution to the “Jewish Problem” was the “Final Solution” adopted at
the Wansee Conference of January 20, 1942.
Why can we say that? The Nazis went out of their way
to not publicize what was actually going on “to the East.” Civilians in
Germany and the Occupied Territories did see the trains and other evidence of
the mass deportations to the Death Camps as Western European Jews were moved
across Germany. And “word surely did get around.” But the policy of
extermination was never officially acknowledged and even Goebbels wrote in his
diary words to the effect of “if the World only knew we were doing, this would
not be good for us.”
Nevertheless, anti-Semitism was a principal part of the
ideology of the Party that eventually took power, one of its major propaganda
weapons. At one level or another, it had a major impact in attracting and
keeping popular support. Previously, it has been considered mainly a
psychological tool, a powerful one to be sure. Now there is a new book,
from Germany, that shows how it was major economic one too. Reviewed in The New
York Times Book Review on February 18, 2006, by Dagmar Herzog, is the English
translation of Goetz Aly’s “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racist War, and
the Welfare State.”
Fascinating stuff, with which I do not have the space to
deal in any detail here. Suffice it to say that with a good deal of
original research, Prof. Aly shows how both the preservation and expansion of
major aspects of the traditional German welfare state, and the use of property
stolen from Jews after their citizenship was stolen from them in the home
country, and then abroad in the conquered ones as they were simply rounded up
for the Death Camps, were major factors in the success of the Nazis in getting
the German people to go along with them on their ride to hell.
In Part 2 of this column, to be published next week, we
shall examine what lessons for the American fascists can be drawn from the Nazi
Germany experience.
“Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is:
total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative
powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies
the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent
personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and
then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it;
and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory
policy.” (If you want to see my longer definitions, please refer to
my “The Political Junkies” columns of May 27, 2004 “On Fascism -- And The
Georgites,” Jan 27, 2005 “Comparing
George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler”, and February 10,
2005, “The Georgite Version of ‘Freedom and Democracy’.”)