We are Not "Good Germans"
While echoes with the 1930s abound, a closer look at how Germans failed to stop Hitler suggests that America's antibodies are much stronger.
This past weekend, I finished reading Sebastian Haffner’s memoir Defying Hitler and found myself oddly optimistic about how we’re doing right now in America. I know, I’ve mentioned many times that I’m a bit of a congenital optimist, a “silver linings guy,” so your mileage may vary. But hear me out.
For those of you unfamiliar with the book, Defying Hitler is an unusual document. Haffner was a young German journalist and historian who fled to Britain in 1938. After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, he was briefly interned there as an “enemy alien” and then released. His first published work, Germany, Jekyll and Hyde, offered a timely, insider-style analysis of Hitler’s Reich and how to confront it, quickly making him a leading commentator. He published several other books on Germany and had a long career writing for British and German magazines.
After Haffner died, his son found an unfinished memoir among his papers and had it published in the summer of 2000, where it was on the top of the nonfiction best-seller list for almost a year. Why did it strike such a nerve? His son Oliver writes in an afterword that:
“It was because the book offers direct answers to two questions that Germans of my generation had been asking their parents since the war: ‘How were the Nazis possible?’ and ‘Why didn’t you stop them?’ The usual replies had been evasive. Frequently those questioned declared that they had known nothing until it was too late. My father’s vivid account makes the rise of the Nazis psychologically comprehensible, and it shows how difficult resistance was, but it also demonstrates that it was plain from the outset what they stood for.”
Defying Hitler, which Haffner wrote in 1939 and never finished, is indeed a valuable contribution to the critical literature on fascism and authoritarianism, though it is hardly a comprehensive work. Rather, it offers the reader a very personal window into the private life of a young German man, an aspiring lawyer who dated a Jewish girl and had nonconformist sensibilities, but who also went along with the beginning of Nazification after came to power in 1933. For those of you who read deeply in this area, I’d put it alongside Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness diaries and Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945.
There are many disturbing parallels between Hitler’s rise and personality and a certain person that we are all too familiar with. He was put on trial and promised the justices who sentenced him that he would get revenge. He encouraged violence against his political adversaries. As Haffner writes, “He promised everything to everybody, which naturally brought him a vast, loose army of followers and voters from among the ignorant, the disappointed, and the dispossessed.”
Likewise, there are eerie parallels to be found in the behavior and leadership of the non-Nazi parties. The Social Democrats, Haffner writes, were “beaten even before the battle had started, so frequently had they been discredited.” And the Communists, he says, “with their sectarian dogma trail[ed] a comet’s tail of defeat.” The German army, a potential factor in determining who would lead the country, stayed “sphinxlike.” Worse, the forces opposed to Hitler’s “dreaded” rise were not just confused but insisted on “hopeless adherence to the rules of the game, which the enemy daily infringes.”
But here’s where the stories diverge. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor at the end of January 1933 and he began purging the civil service and turned the police into an army of the Nazi Party, ordinary Germans did not protest in any significant way. Even after the Reichstag fire on February 27, prohibitions on free speech, the banning of all parties on the left, and the first wave of arrests of left-wing legislators and other intelligentsia, there was little protest. No one tried to organize any kind of mass non-cooperation—instead, quasi-militias that had been built by the Social Democrats and the Communists melted into thin air.
And yet, on March 5, 1933, the last elections in Nazi Germany take place, Hitler got just 44% of the vote. Fifty-six percent of Germany did not vote for him, a point Haffner emphasizes multiple times. But as he writes, “In March 1933, millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders.” Many eventually gave into the Nazis’ allure and joined the party, or went along with the movement because they felt they had no alternative. Later some claimed to have not supported Nazism but did nothing to resist it—the so-called “good Germans.”
We are not in the same timeline.
There is a Defiant opposition to Trump’s lawlessness and racism, and it is growing. On April 5, close to two million Americans showed up about 1,300 Hands Off rallies around the country. Two months later, on June 14, there were No Kings protests in 2,200 locations, totaling five to perhaps six million people. Now, a similarly broad coalition of groups have announced a second No Kings mobilization for October 18. And there are already 2,200 rallies scheduled—with nearly three weeks to go. It’s safe to say that the Defiance is getting bigger, not smaller, even as the regime is trying to accelerate its power-grab.
What happened around talk show host Jimmy Kimmel is indicative. First, after a joke Kimmel made in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination went flat, Disney bent to threats from Trump’s FCC Chair Brendan Karr and took Kimmel off the air. Then a network of grassroots organizers rapidly responded with a call for protests at ABC TV stations and a boycott of Disney’s products. Hundreds of thousands of people canceled their Disney cable subscriptions and the company’s stock took a billion-dollar hit. Within days, Kimmel was back on the air.
As Ian Bassin, the co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy said to me less than a month ago on my This Old Democracy podcast, we are in the middle of a see-saw battle for the future. There is a vicious spiral that can work to the benefit of a would-be authoritarian, but there is also a virtuous cycle that can reverse that course, where brave groups and leaders stand up and “pierce the veil of invincibility and inevitability.” When that happens, Bassin said, “the veil of fear starts to lift, and the people and institutions then feel empowered to uphold their oaths and check power and autocratic power is disrupted.”
There’s a long list of people and institutions that have stood up and are standing up against the cruelty and chaos of this administration and for the rule of law, starting with Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who publicly challenged the president on his first day in office and who is still courageously speaking out. According to a YouGov poll conducted for IssueOne at the end of August, most Americans said the president should not be able to cross “red lines” like sending Americans to foreign prisons, handing their data over to private surveillance companies or using force against peaceful protestors. His authoritarian agenda is deeply unpopular.
Yes, we face severe challenges – but we are not in the Germany of 1933. We are not “good Germans.” Our future is still unwritten.
—Related: More than 3,000 non-profit organizations (and counting) have signed an open letter organized by Democracy Defenders Action rejecting the Trump administration’s new September 25 memorandum targeting non-profit groups.
Apocalypse Not Now
—There was a lot of speculation before this morning’s unprecedented gathering of 800 top US generals and officers at the Pentagon for a pep talk from newly anointed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth that this was it – the moment when they’d purge disloyal officers from the military and enlist the rest in their trumped-up war on Democratic-run cities. (Remember, doom sells, just like rumors of martial law being declared on April 20th also spread.) But it may be that something far more interesting took place.
There’s speculation that President Metamucilini decided to also attend and in effect upstage Hegseth so as to reduce the political damage the former Fox News weekend host (Hegseth) is causing with the brass, who don’t like being lectured to for “lacking warrior ethos” or having their time wasted. This post from a former West Point lecturer with an admittedly dubious history (convicted once for fraud) makes that case. If something is too good to be true, it probably isn’t – so take this all with a big grain of salt.
But I also note that my friend Marc Cooper had a similar take: “Any remote chance for a pro-Trump military coup lessened today because a lot of these officers would have second, third and fourth thoughts about breaking the democratic order to keep this moron fossil in power.”
Either way, Hegseth does a terrible Patton.
Peace In Our Time?
I’m sorry but if you think Trump’s just-announced Peace Plan to end the Gaza war is going to work, I have a Trump Peace Plan to end the Ukraine war to refer you to. It’s a sign of how degraded things have become that nearly all the players involved – Israeli leaders and opposition figures, major American Jewish organizations, the Arab countries that are part of the Abraham Accords – are behaving as if Trump’s plan has clothes. Even if Hamas decides to accept its terms, there’s no way Trump has the mental ability or fortitude to sweat all the details into being implemented.
Duly Noted
--Pro+Democracy, Power Lab and the Democracy & Power in Action Fund have just published a major report on “Civic Power and the Role of Independent Political Organizations in Expanding the Electorate and Building Governing Influence.” I’m setting it aside for a closer read, but here’s an introduction from David Donnelly that should whet your appetite.
--All you need to know about the priorities of tech entrepreneurs and VCs today.
End Times
“Slow and Expensive Buses!” is a great slogan!
Really nice column today. Your writing gives color to bleak times. And I look forward to reading the memoire of the "young German."
Though you profess to have faith that our movement opposing the regime has teeth, I have recently felt that we might be losing a race against time. But today, the "stone-faced generals" (as many commentators have described them) showed zero warmth to the two despots who stole some of their valuable hours on this earth, ranting and raving about masculinity and enemies within. It is to them that I now look for support. Will they, or won't they, consider our American cities as training grounds for training troops with fresh shaven faces, lean bods, and a warrior ethos?
Micah, I certainly hope you are right (actually left) about the current moment. Am I optimistic, but the hope you inspire is a call to action. Thank you also for speaking out about the farce of Trump Peace Plan to end the war Gaza. I am amazed at how many mainstream commentators want to give it a chance (seemingly persuaded that Arab states and the PA are signing on). Netanyahu knows and says that this is simply the terms of surrender for Hamas to allow Israel to reconstruct at someone else's expense, the status quo ante in Gaza (i.e., the ghetto with controlled nutrition for 2 million Palestinians) while continuing the ethnic cleansing and annexation in the West Bank. He will sell this to his right wing. He will remind them of the value of Gaza as a holding tank for millions of Palestinians that will enable a Jewish Democratic Israel from the River to the Sea (except for Gaza). As an added bonus perhaps a new resistance movement will rise up for them to crush in the name of security. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.