That Ted Talk video about Hitler

This is a rough outline put together in ten minutes off the top of my head. But these are all points any serious talk about Hitler’s rise to power should mention.

This is rough, and I haven’t time to cite sources, but it’s a start. I didn’t see much of a discussion of any of these points:

(1) The story begins well before WW1 — a lot of Germans were antisemitic already. But why? Antisemitism was an ingrained part of Christianity in Germany and elsewhere in Europe for hundreds of years — going back to the ‘blood curse’ of Pontius Pilate.

(2) Germany was created in 1870 by Bismarck’s “blood and iron” policy and was already fairly militarized, too. The military had a strong hand in the unification of Germany. During WW1, General Erich Ludendorff and General Paul von Hindenburg effectively supplanted the Kaiser in all but name as the real dictators of the country.

(3) Hitler was born in Austria, and spent some formative years in the Austro-Hungarian capital. Vienna was a true multicultural city at the time, being the center of an multinational empire that encompassed ethnic Germans, Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Hungarians, Serbo-Croatians, and Bosniaks (apologies if I missed any.) The peoples practiced multiple faiths, including Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodox, Islam and, of course, Judaism. We like to think that exposure to multiculturalism leads to harmony but, in this case, Hitler’s experience led him to the opposite conclusion. Is there something we should meditate on there?

(4) There’s no mention of all about the Beer Hall Putsch that Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff (the de facto dictator of Germany during WW1,) attempted in Bavaria in ’23. That was kind of significant — the political and military situation in Germany was still sufficiently in flux that a coup was quite thinkable — and was supported by one of the two most respected German military leaders that came out of the war.

(5) I could write a really boring and financially unsuccessful book with lots of footnotes about the fabricated ‘Germany was stabbed in the back’ story generated and repeated by military leaders like Ludendorff and von Hindenburg (and others) to explain away Germany’s actual military defeat by blaming on the Social Democrats who ran the only government remaining after the Kaiser abdicated, and had to negotiate with the pigheaded Wilson and others who insisted on a punitive peace instead of showing a little bit of generosity toward the defeated but still important Germany.

(6) It’s worth noting that many of the Social Democrats who signed the Versailles Treaty and set up the postwar Weimar Republic were, coincidentally, Jewish as well. Given the anti semitic history in Germany, this plugged into a narrative that the Army leadership was quite comfortable selling and the German public was all to eager to buy.

(7) The Communists (KPD) actually worked WITH the Nazis (NSDAP) in the Reichstag to bring down successive governments — they believed that they could continuously bring down the governments, power would lay in the streets, and they thought they’d win in such a fight. (KPD thugs fought with the S.A. — the NSDAP’s own gang of street thugs while all of this was going on.)

(8) Hitler didn’t need to do too much to convince people that the KPD was a threat. Communists had actually seized control of Bavaria in 1919, and the German Freikorps — essentially demobilized WW1 German soldiers working on their own — expelled them from power. The Freikorps also fought a series of battles against the Soviets in the east, to prevent them from dominating parts of central Europe (most of which would, alas, fall under the Russians’ thumb 25 years later anyway.)

(9) The line about the “fragmented left” was nonsense. It was the center parties of the left and right that were fragmented and ineffectual. They kept pursuing their immediate partisan interest instead of trying to work together in a coalition to create a stable government.

(8) Also unmentioned is the fact that Hitler NEVER GOT MORE THAN 33% of the VOTE IN A FREE ELECTION. In the last semi-free election, in 1933, he couldn’t even get an absolute majority — only ~43% of the vote.

(9) von Hindenburg was not inclined to appoint Hitler as Chancellor in the first place. He viewed him as a low-class corporal and a thug. Only the repeated spectacle of the revolving-door governments in Berlin (governments were losing votes of confidence on an annual basis, requiring new elections,) and the support of politicians (particularly von Papen) convinced the elderly General to relent.

(10) By the way…how the hell could a video purportedly about the rise of Hitler neglect to mention the economic chaos in Germany that began in 1919, and which was only exacerbated by the Great Depression? 20%+ real unemployment for a decade. You think that might have had something to do with it…?

(11) Also — the dissolution of the German and Austrian empires in the post WW1 settlements left many ethnic Germans outside Germany, and in many places (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Baltic States,) they were minorities among ethnic groups they had once ruled. This caused a certain amount of discomfort for ethnic Germans.

(12) Nitpick #1 — Why in the name of all that is holy is Paul von Hindenburg represented in the video with an image of Josef-fucking-Stalin?

(13) Nitpick #2 — is isn’t it funny that Hitler was from AUSTRIA, not Germany? He was an immigrant to Germany who earned that nationality through military service in the war, yet he became an ultra-nationalist leader.

There are, indeed, lessons to be learned from the rise of Hitler. But you should never lose sight of the fact that Hitler was a specific man that arose in a specific area and managed to seize power for a specific set of reasons that had everything . This video seems less an examination of those, and more a facile gloss relying on secondary sources that will primarily be linked in social media to posts along the lines of “ZOMG, I HATE X’S POLITICS THEREFORE X IS HITLER, SEE THIS VIDEO, IT’S BETTER THAN TREVOR NOAH!”

If “it” happens here, it will not be like Hitler’s rise. In fact, given the how much of a (negative) cultural icon, a putative American Hitler could never even superficially look like Hitler. It will be an American politician, with an American narrative who has arisen due to specifically American problems. There are, in fact, quite a few things that mitigate against a Hitler arising in the USA, at least as it exists today, such as:

(1) A tradition of the open expression of ideas, freedom of religion, freedom of association.

(2) A Constitution that doesn’t just limit the government, but also serves as a starting point for some of American culture (e.g., how many times do Americans angrily decry denial of “rights” to things, regardless of whether it involves official government oppression.) All else being equal, places like San Francisco, Seattle, or Portland could usually be counted on to be bastions of free thought and intellectual opposition against a truly oppressive state.

(3) An armed citizenry. Have you seen the kind of weapons we can buy over the counter here? Hitler’s S.A. were street brawlers. All else being equal, places like Texas, the Deep South, and the Rocky Mountains would be bastions of armed resistance against such folk.

(4) A tradition of military deference to civilian leadership.

(5) A tradition of resolving political disputes through elections and politics and not violence. America was a voluntary union of sovereign states, not a union of mini-nations forged together by hot lead and cold steel.

Granted, None of these things really existed in Germany in the 1920s. Some of them are under attack in America today, but these cultural traditions still exist.

TED should do better.