Quotidian Life at the Dawn of Cosmic Evil
Would you recognize the signs?
This is a fascinating and insightful book. The author, William Sheridan Allen, provides a survey of the political history of Northeim, a small town in the Protestant northern German state of Hanover, from the early 1920s to the end of World War II. The book was written originally in the early 1970s but was subsequently revised and re-issued, mostly to end the use of pseudonyms after the town had been identified.
In many ways, Northeim was like a lot of Protestant Germany. There was a strong Socialist party (aka the “Social Democrat Party” (SPD)) that represented the working class, while the middle and upper classes were represented by several nationalist and conservative parties.
National Socialism came to Northeim through a handful of young idealists, some of whom were very respectable. Throughout the 1920s, and particularly in the early 1930s, the Nazi party drew votes away from the nationalist parties until it had a majority of the votes, at which time, with the assumption of power by Hitler, it simply put an end to opposition.
It seems that Nazism prevailed because it was much better at organizing than its opponents. The local party was able to gauge what messages worked best among voters by seeing whether certain topics drew attention. The local party was then able to book speakers to follow up on the material that attracted attention.
The Nazis were also running a perpetual campaign which allowed them to get more experience in the critical democratic practice of mobilizing voters. To put it simply, the Nazis were better at the “Get Out the Vote” phase of democracy.
In contrast, antisemitism did not play a substantial role in Nazi popularity. Antisemitic policies were not implemented by the Nazis until after the seizure of power in 1933. Instead, the Nazis ran a positive campaign based on what they proposed to do for Germany by emphasizing national and class unity.
Political violence did play a role in Northeim during the last five years of the Weimar Republic. The Nazi SA was not the only player in that game. The SPD had its Reichsbanner forces who were willing to mix it up with the SA on the streets. The Reichsbanner was in a position to defend the German republic at the time of Hitler’s take-over, except that its leadership had a failure of will and never pulled the trigger on a counter-coup.[1]
Perhaps the democratic forces, including the SPD and the Catholic Center Party that provided support to the Reichsbanner lacked imagination. They might not have imagined that the Nazis were playing for keeps as opposed to merely posturing about playing for keeps. The parallel to Democrats who talk about putting MAGA supporters into re-education camps, such as Hillary Clinton and others, is worth contemplating.
The result was that leading SPD and Reichsbanner members in Northheim were picked off as individuals and sent to concentration camps or beaten into submission. When they returned, they were silent and compliant citizens of Nazi Germany.
A salient point about the Nazi takeover was that once the individual members of the SPD were not protected by their party, they lost the will to fight. The mighty SPD was destroyed within the space of months not by direct action but because their members were isolated, stigmatized, and persecuted by other Germans who were not Nazis.
SPD members often found themselves unable to find work or housing because of their previous party membership. The actors weren’t Nazis so much as people who were afraid that they might become the subject of Nazi reprisals or who wished to curry favor with Nazis or who were simply going along with the “arc of history.”
The Nazis were assisted by the polarization of politics during the last years of the republic. Germans were subjected to repeated political campaigns which kept the political parties out in the streets at all times making claims on individual Germans.
I read this book while I was preparing for trial in a case where my client — a MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) hat-wearing science fiction author — had been stigmatized and retaliated against because he supported Trump. At the time that I wrote this, there were news stories describing attacks on people wearing MAGA hats. A few years before that Brandon Eich — the CEO of Firefox — had been forced to resign by a hate campaign on the internet because he had donated to the campaign against homosexual marriage in California.
That was back in 2018. Since 2018, we have had:
President Biden has been manufacturing a version of the “Communist threat” message to terrify voters into supporting him. For example, in 2022, Biden gave a speech on the “MAGA extremist threat” that had optics similar to those of a Nazi rally. The consensus — even on the Left — was that this speech was unprecedented.
Violent leftist protesters have repeatedly taken to the streets, particularly in 2020, during an election year, where they attacked federal courthouses, police stations, and Trump supporters, with a police response that was as weak as the police response of Weimar Germany was to the Brownshirt excesses. Left-wing rioters even locked the doors of buildings they torched in an effort to commit mass murder.
American society over the last four years has been stressed by something similar to “constant campaigns.” Covid quarantines coincided with leftist street warfare. A four-hour protest with surprisingly limited damage to the Capitol for what has been called an “insurrection” and compared to the Civil War has been turned into a justification for federal agents to kick the doors in of non-entities in Madera, California because they might have been in Washington DC on January 6, 2021. The FBI showed itself to be committed to DEI by spending its time kicking in the door of a person with limited mobility:
Block flew to the nation’s capital to attend the Trump rally Wednesday, met a large contingent of Proud Boys from across the country, and drove his scooter along with them to the Capitol building.
The Capitol complex stairs were a challenge for Block’s scooter, but Proud Boys lifted it down.
What was going on here?
Well, the Reichstag Fire allowed a crackdown on Communists. What was important to Dr. Goebbels in April 1933 was sending a message about who was in charge. Eddie Block and his mobility scooter served the same purpose.
The parallels between America in the post-Obama years and the end of the Weimar Republic in German history are a bit too “on the nose” for comfort.
