Defying Trump: Lessons From 1933 Germany (Part One)

A remarkable book by Sebastian Haffner helps us understand the rise of fascism in the United States.

I. The United States: A Survey

In just a few months, a coarse, artless, criminal strongman has taken control of the entire federal government—including, as of yesterday, the nation’s capital (or “Capital,” as he writes it, capitalizing his nouns like a good German).

Trump owns the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the Speaker of the House. Congress is powerless to stop him. The wealthiest tech-bros in Silicon Valley and most of the legacy media CEOs have lined up behind him. Colleges and universities have capitulated to his demands, as have white-shoe law firms and venerable broadcasting companies. He’s transformed U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement into his own secret state police. He’s using the FBI and the Justice Department to attack his enemies. He’s building concentration camps. He’s enriching himself on a grand scale. And every word that comes out of his puckered little mouth is a lie.

How did this happen?

While on vacation in Barcelona, I came across the most cogent explanation I’ve yet encountered. It was written, appropriately, by a German—a brilliant journalist named Sebastian Haffner. Here is an excerpt:

At rally after rally all through the summer and fall of 2024, Trump bellowed that he would win—his supporters didn’t even have to vote, because he had Elon’s help—and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired attorney general did not think of changing his strategy, insisting instead on the preservation of “norms.” In the presidential election against Joe Biden, Trump had declared that victory was his, in any case. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next rally, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. The House invested considerable time and energy investigating the coup attempt of January 6th, in which his supporters besieged the Capitol and policemen were killed, and concluded that Trump was responsible. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the insurrectionists were pardoned.

It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that of the other: the savage impudence that gradually made it possible for the unpleasant orange apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what it was he was up to—namely, when he capped it with something even more outrageous and monstrous; then, also, the hypnotic trance into which his public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of depravity and the ecstasy of evil.

Besides, 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.

Spot on, right?

Here’s the twist: Haffner wrote that in 1939—before the Nazis invaded Poland. He was reflecting on how the “unpleasant little apostle of hate”—I swapped “orange” for “little”—had come to power: how Hitler had bamboozled the German people into voting away their freedom, and how the German people had failed to meet the moment.

Obviously I modified the first paragraph to serve my rhetorical purposes, but the spirit of the original is unchanged: a loud, hateful psychopath keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, no one in a position of authority stops him, and the unthinkable comes true. This is what Haffner actually wrote:

Summoned as a witness before the highest German court, Hitler bellowed at the judges that he would one day come to power by strictly constitutional means and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired president of the supreme court did not think of ordering the witness to be taken into custody for contempt. In the presidential elections against Hindenburg, Hitler declared that victory was his, in any case. His opponent was eighty-five, he was forty-three; he could wait. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next meeting, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. One night, six storm troopers fell on a “dissident” in his bed and literally trampled him to death, for which they were sentenced to death. Hitler sent them a telegram of praise and acknowledgment. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the murderers were pardoned.

The parallels are as obvious as they are disturbing.

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Haffner—the pen name of Raimund Pretzel—was born in Berlin in 1907, the son of a Prussian government official. As a boy, he thrilled to the exploits of the Kaiser’s army during the Great War, like most of his contemporaries. He was not particularly “political.” He did not care for the Communists; if anything, he was more “right” than “left.” But he loathed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He realized early on, in the years after the First World War, that political zealotry in Berlin was the province of “the more stupid, coarse, and unpleasant among my schoolfellows”—and all of those young, dumb bullies bought what the creepy watercolorist from Linz was selling. Haffner himself was “Aryan,” but he had a lot of Jewish friends, including his then-girlfriend, and he was morally outraged at the disgusting anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.

As the situation grew more dire, Haffner fled Berlin, first to Paris, then to London, where, in 1939, he began a memoir—an account of how the Nazis had come to power. Unlike other works of this kind, his book is not an examination of what Hitler did, but rather how the German people, especially the ones who should have known better, reacted and responded to what Hitler did. He makes the case that his experience, as an individual German citizen living through the rise of the Third Reich, reflected the experience of hundreds of thousands of German citizens—the majority of whom, after all, had not voted for the Nazis. The book is a chronicle of the political zeitgeist. It tracks the evolution of the emotions, the feelings, the vibes of the German nation, and explicates how and why Adolf Hitler, of all people, this nebbishy little weirdo, became not only chancellor but führer.

Published in German as Germany: A Survey, in English, the memoir is called Defying Hitler—a poor title, as it isn’t representative of the contents (there is not much defying of Hitler going on); plus, functionally, having HITLER emblazoned on the cover of a book makes it awkward to read at the airport.

Haffner abandoned the project in 1939, after the war started, “presumably because its theme is the question of how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power,” as his son and (wonderful) translator, Oliver Pretzel, explains in the introduction. “Instead he started another one, whose subject was the more urgent question of how to deal with Nazi Germany.”

The manuscript sat unread in a filing cabinet for decades. It was only published in 2001, two years after Haffner’s death, becoming a best-seller in Germany. While his original plan for A Survey was to chronicle his experiences through his emigration to England in 1938, he doesn’t get nearly that far. The action breaks off in 1933. I would have loved for it to continue—it feels like if Andor hadn’t come back for the second season—but he gives us more than enough insight to make his point.

Nineteen thirty-three was the crucial year in which Hitler and the Nazis established their power. It’s helpful, in the U.S. of 2025, to focus just on the events of that year. Here is a quick timeline:

January 30, 1933
The moribund president, Hindenburg—a “traitor,” Haffner rightly calls him—appoints Hitler as chancellor. Nazis are now in charge of Germany.

February 27, 1933
The Reichstag Fire—a “false flag” act of terrorism blamed on the rival Communists and used as a pretext for Hitler to crack down on his political opponents.

March 5, 1933
In the last free elections, the Nazis garner 43.9 percent of the popular vote—but exploit the parliamentary system and the feckless leaders of the German Nationalist People’s Party to remain in control.

March 22, 1933
The first concentration camp is established at Dachau, where dissidents and political opponents of the Nazis are sent after their arrests.

March 23, 1933
The Enabling Act grants Hitler dictatorial powers.

April 1, 1933
The Nazis impose a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. This kicks off an incremental process of barring German Jews from the civil service, the legal profession, the armed forces, the arts, agriculture, journalism, and so on.

April 26, 1933
The Gestapo—a truncation of Geheime Staatspolizei; literally the secret state police—is established.

As you can see—and as any American paying attention to the news these days can attest—it does not take that long for a stubborn and dedicated strongman, however ridiculous he may appear, to acquire fearsome authoritarian powers.

Defying Hitler is jawdroppingly good: as a piece of writing, as a personal memoir, as a social history, as a political analysis. And it is eerily, uncomfortably, shockingly current. I lost track of how many times I gasped out loud as I was reading, noting the unpleasant similarities between Germany in 1933 and the U.S. right now. Insofar as Trump has modeled himself on Hitler, and MAGA on the Nazi Party, the book is instructive—terrifying, to be sure, but not unhopeful.

Because of the ticking-time-bomb urgency, I’m going to quote from the book at length in this two-part piece, and hope that Mr. Pretzel does not object. With that said, I urge everyone to buy Defying Hitler and read it. Haffner’s memoir is beautifully written, short, fascinating, and not as depressing as the subject matter suggests. His disappointment and disgust with his countrymen feels very familiar. Defying Hitler is the single most important work I’ve come across, in terms of understanding the here and now.

There are, to reiterate, an alarming number of parallels between Germany in 1933 and the United States today. But there are also subtle differences, which, I believe, and which I hope, augur a better future here now than there then. The key difference, of course, as I’ve said many times on various broadcasts, is that the Germans of 1933 did not have the benefit of knowing what happened in Germany in 1933. They were caught blindsided. We have no such excuse.

Especially given this historical hindsight, it is both shameful and depressing that Donald Trump was elected a second time. But the historical precedent for such national stupidity still exists, as Haffner shows.

More importantly, there’s still time to change course. ICE isn’t gunning down dissidents yet. The MAGA concentration camps are still mostly empty. As of this writing, we haven’t invaded Greenland. World War III has not begun. We can—and must—learn from what didn’t work in Germany, and apply that knowledge to the here and now.

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II. The Other

It wasn’t the Jews who imposed crippling reparations on France after the Franco-Prussian War, nor did the Jews seize Alsace and Lorraine from the French. The Kaiser, the Great War’s prime mover and thus the author of all that woe, was not a Jew. The Jews did not sign the Treaty of Versailles on Germany’s behalf, the Jews did not mismanage the Germany economy until the mark collapsed, the Jews did not cause the hyperinflation that roiled the country for months in 1923. In short, the Jews were not to blame for any of the ills that befell Germany in the Weimar period—certainly not as a collective group.

But Adolf Hitler blamed the Jews anyway. In speech after speech after spittle-flecked speech, and in the ponderous and stupid book he wrote in prison, he used the Jewish people as a scapegoat for the self-inflicted failures of the German state.

Tragically, the tactic worked. The German people—or, rather, enough German people—wanted so badly to blame an external force for their problems that they swallowed the lies whole. And when Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis began to crack down on German Jews, with the first of April being the formal debut of anti-Semitism as official government policy.

The sudden and violent anti-Jewish crackdown, Haffner writes,

aroused in the German people something one might not have expected after the previous four weeks: widespread alarm. A murmur of dissent, suppressed but audible, spread through the land. The Nazis sensed that they had gone too far for the moment, and withdrew some of their measures after April 1. Not, however, without first allowing these to unleash the full force of their terror. By now everyone knows to what extent the Nazis have changed their true intentions.

Apart from the terror, the unsettling and depressing aspect of this first murderous declaration of intent was that it triggered a flood of arguments and discussions all over Germany, not about anti-Semitism but about the “Jewish question.” This is a trick the Nazis have since successfully repeated many times on other “questions” and in international affairs. By publicly threatening a person, an ethnic group, a nation, or a region with death and destruction, they provoke a general discussion not about their own existence, but about the right of their victims to exist. In this way that right is put in question.

Suddenly everyone felt justified, and indeed required, to have an opinion about the Jews, and to state it publicly. Distinctions were made between “decent” Jews and the others. If some pointed to the achievements of Jewish scientists, artists, and doctors to justify the Jews (justify? what for? against what?), others would counter that they were a detrimental “foreign influence” in these spheres. Indeed, it soon became customary to count it against the Jews if they had a respectable or intellectually valuable profession. This was treated as a crime or, at the very least, a lack of tact. The defenders of the Jews were frowningly told that it was reprehensible of the Jews to have such-and-such a percentage of doctors, lawyers, journalists, etc. Indeed, percentage calculations were a popular ingredient of the “Jewish question.” People discussed whether the percentage of Jews among the members of the Communist Party was not too high, and among the casualties of the Great War perhaps too low. (This is the literal truth. I heard this argument in the mouth of an educated man with a Ph.D., who reckoned himself a member of the cultured class. He argued quite seriously that the twelve thousand Jewish dead in the Great War was too small a proportion of the Jewish population in comparison with the corresponding number of “Aryans” killed, and derived from this a certain justification for Nazi anti-Semitism.)

So: Well-educated people, wealthy people, rich people, lawyers, all making excuses for overt fascism and vile prejudice. Huh. JD Vance: Yale. Pete Hegseth: Princeton. Stephen Miller: Duke. Peter Thiel: Stanford. Curtis Yarvin: Brown. Leonard Leo: Cornell. Emil Bove: Georgetown. Jared Kushner: Harvard. And so on.

The ripple effects of the abominable horrors committed by the Nazis nine decades ago continue to this day, in ways that aren’t always obvious. In the most riveting and unexpected sequence in Billy Joel: And So It Goes, the excellent documentary I wrote about on Sunday, Billy Joel, speaking with the cool authority of a history professor, unflinchingly relates the tragic story of his father Helmut’s family, which had the misfortune of living in Nuremberg in 1933. His grandfather, Karl Amson Joel, was a prosperous textile merchant, the owner of Joel Macht Fabrik—until he wasn’t. The Nazis—whose hateful rallies young Helmut watched warily from his family’s stately home, overlooking the lovely park repurposed by the Nazis as a rally grounds—began to enforce the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1, 1933, as we’ve discussed. Not long after, Karl Amson Joel was forced to sell his factory for pennies on the dollar—money he was never able to collect. He fled with his family to Switzerland, and from there to the U.S., and just in the nick of time.

“He was lucky,” Billy Joel tells us, in this documentary ostensibly about his remarkable career in music. “If my grandparents had been found on the train with the documents that said ‘Jew,’ they would’ve been sent immediately to a concentration camp. They got out. A miracle.”

How many didn’t get out? How many Billy Joels were never born?

After its appropriation by the Nazis, we’re told, Joel Macht Fabrik wound up making the striped uniforms worn by Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. Helmut Joel, who changed his name to Howard when he came to the United States, fought against Germany in the war, and was on hand when Dachau was liberated.

Billy Joel was born in 1949. As far away as 1939-45 may feel, especially to the angry young men who make up a significant portion of the MAGA base, World War II is still recent history.

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What made the crackdowns even more despicable, if that were possible, is that Hitler did not have to select the Jews as his scapegoat. Any out-group would have done the trick. As Haffner explains (and I’m going to bold-face the sentence that made me want to stand up on the airplane and applaud):

Today it is quite clear that Nazi anti-Semitism had nothing to do with the virtues or vices of the Jews. The interesting thing about the Nazis’ intention to train the Germans to be persecutors of the Jews throughout the world, and if possible exterminate them, an intention they made no secret of, is not the justification they gave. That is such utter nonsense that it is demeaning even to take it seriously enough to argue against it. It is the intention itself that is significant. It is something new in the history of the world: an attempt to deny humans the solidarity of every species that enables it to survive; to turn human predatory instincts, that are normally directed against other animals, against members of their own species, and to make a whole nation into a pack of hunting hounds. Once the violence and readiness to kill that lies beneath the surface of human nature has been awakened and turned against other humans, and even made into a duty, it is a simple matter to change the target. That can be clearly seen today; instead of “Jews,” one can just as easily say “Czechs” or “Poles” or anyone else.

We have here the systematic infection of a whole nation, Germany, with a germ that causes its people to treat their victims like wolves; or, to put it differently, the freeing and revitalization of precisely those sadistic instincts whose chaining and restraint has been the work of a thousand years of civilization.

Trump is an inveterate anti-Semite—among many other examples, he called Nazis with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us” “very fine people,” which inspired Billy Joel to pin a yellow Jewish star on his lapel in protest—but anti-Semitism is not a plank in the MAGA platform. Indeed, much of Donald’s more extreme fascist tendencies are stoked by Stephen Miller, his Goebbels-like advisor, who is himself Jewish, despite being a veritable Nazi. Also, Trump’s Nazis have the audacity to use allegations of anti-Semitism as an excuse to deny funding to universities that don’t toe the MAGA line.

But Trump has appropriated Hitler’s tactic of scapegoating out-groups—specifically, immigrants and trans people. We are now over half a year into the Trump Redux. ICE has firmly established itself as the American Gestapo. Innocent people—legal residents who happen to have brown skin—are being kidnapped by masked federal agents, held without due process, and, in many cases, trafficked to hideous concentration camps in El Salvador, South Sudan, and the like.

Widespread alarm? Yes. Withdraw of some measures? Also yes. But the kidnappings have not, and will not, stop.

Trans people, meanwhile, comprise a tiny percentage of the U.S. population. Every single one of the trans women who participated in a high-level athletic event and “cheated” to win some sort of medal—a scenario Trump often brings up, as if it’s some national crisis—could fit comfortably in a Honda Odyssey. Likewise, his disgusting Republican allies act as if AMAB trans people with full bladders seeking to relieve themselves with dignity are a greater threat to the republic than, oh I don’t know, giving the nuclear launch codes to a treasury-plundering, child-raping, Putin-fluffing, Epstein-loving, Hitler-emulating dimwit.

In immigrants and trans people, Trump has found the out-groups that a significant percentage of Americans—the hateful, the ignorant, and the stupid, mostly; and also, it must be said, the white—won’t move a finger to defend. The rest of us must do so. We must safeguard immigrants and trans people as if their capture and eradication spells the end of democracy in the United States—because it does.

Especially in these bleak months, it has been heartening to watch Americans—some of them politicians, but most, ordinary citizens—insert themselves between ICE agents and their victims.

That defiant energy, Haffner reports, was AWOL in 1933 Germany. “What was completely absent,” he observes, “was any act of courage or spirit by any of the participants. The month of March demonstrated that the Nazis had achieved an unassailable position of power: through terror, celebration and rhetoric, treachery, and finally a collective breakdown—a million individuals simultaneously suffered a nervous collapse. More bloodshed has accompanied the birth of many European states, but none came into being in a more loathsome way.”

Later in that chapter, he writes: “This terrible moral bankruptcy of the opposition leadership is a fundamental characteristic of the March ‘revolution’ of 1933. It made the Nazi victory exceedingly easy.”

Cut to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, to Merrick Garland and the Democrats who shivved Joe Biden, all of them still in denial, none of them understanding that they should be hanging their heads in shame.

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The Second World War ended 80 years ago. Less than five percent of the U.S. population was born before 1945, and even fewer before 1933, when the Nazis came to power. The war is a distant memory. As I’m not the first to point out, the lack of first-hand experience dealing with fascism has abetted MAGA’s attempted rehabilitation of Hitler and the Nazi Party, to the extent that Elon Musk can do a “Heil Hitler” salute in front of a big crowd of people—twice—and the general consensus is to shrug it off.

But it wasn’t that long ago that Hitler blew his brains out in the bunker, that Germany limply surrendered, and that Allied forces—including Billy Joel’s father!—liberated the extermination camps.

There are 15 million Americans who are old enough to remember that. One of them is the retired NFL coach, U.S. Air Force veteran Marv Levy, 100 years old this month, whose Buffalo Bills famously lost the Super Bowl four times in a row. A sportswriter once asked him if the Super Bowl was a must-win.

“No, it’s not a must-win,” Levy said. “World War II was a must-win.”

So is this.

For Part Two, click here.

Big thanks to “Chopin’s Heart” for sending me the Haffner book!

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Photo credits:

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem receives a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center CECOT with the Minister of Justice and Public Security Gustavo Villatoro in Tecoluca, El Salvador, March 26, 2025. (DHS photo by Tia Dufour/Released).

In April 1933, the National Socialists in NSDAP initiated an anti-Jewish/anti-Semitic boycott against Jewish shops and businesses in Germany. This early labeling and harassment of Jewish-owned businesses were stark examples of the discrimination and persecution of Germany's Jewish population 1933–1945 and an important step on the way to the later enactment of anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany 1933–1945 and ultimately the Holocaust in Europe. (Photographer unknown, courtesy Polish National Archives).