Defying Trump: Lessons From 1933 Germany (Part Two)
A remarkable book by Sebastian Haffner helps us understand the rise of fascism in the United States.
From Part One:
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, which Mr. Pretzel has graciously permitted me to do. 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.
For the rest of Part One, click here.
III. The Big Lies
What I wrote on the last day of Trump’s first term, about Donald’s antipathy towards the truth, is no less true today—but much more ominous:
Trump’s term in office began with an assault on the truth. The first time that Sean Spicer, the newly-minted press secretary, addressed the White House press corps, he lied about the size of the crowd at the Inauguration—and he did so at the new president’s behest. Spicer may as well have been standing next to Shaquille O’Neal, indignantly insisting he was taller. We knew he was lying, he knew he was lying, the press corps knew he was lying, Saturday Night Live certainly knew he was lying. Even Chuck Todd, no journalistic paragon, took exception to it, in what turned out to be a historic episode of Meet the Press. There was uneasiness, certainly, and plenty of jokes made at Spicer’s expense. But few imagined that this pathetic spectacle was merely the opening salvo in a four-year onslaught against reality.
Trump’s war on the truth did not begin when he took office, of course. Maybe it started when Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg allowed his social media team to weaponize Facebook. Maybe it started when Jeff Zucker, president of CNN, gave him all that free airtime and presented him, falsely, as a serious presidential candidate. Maybe it started when The Apprentice showrunner Mark Burnett played Professor Higgins to Trump’s Eliza Doolittle, packaging him, falsely, as a successful, self-made billionaire, and trust-washing him for the American public. Maybe it started when Trump joined Twitter, and opted to insert the word “real” in his handle, before his actual name. Or maybe it started on his first visit to Moscow in 1987, when the KGB identified him as a promising asset for future use. Whatever the case, the annihilation of truth is Trump’s greatest achievement as president—his lone success. During the last four years, reality was not the winner. So many lies! So much gaslighting! So much bullshit!
I am hardly the first observer to note that the repetition of the große Lüge—the Big Lie—is a propaganda technique developed by the Nazis. Hitler wrote about this in Mein Kampf, one of very few books Trump is believed to have read. You can find it in Volume I, Chapter X, in which Hitler lies bigly about how “the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists” endeavored “to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man”—General Erich Ludendorff—“who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame,” thus spreading a “big lie” about how Germany lost the war. Hitler simply could not accept—and, more importantly, knew his countrymen would prefer not to accept—that Germany got its ass kicked in 1914-18 for the simple reason that the Allied Powers kicked Germany’s ass.
The hateful weirdo continued:
All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, writing in Die Zeit ohne Beispiel in 1941, accused the British of similar mendacity: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”
The Jews were not doing this, of course. Nor were the British. On the contrary, it was Hitler, Goebbels, and the Nazis—the accusers!—who traded in big lies.
An apprentice of a world-class big liar in Roy Cohn, Trump has taken the Goebbels dictum to heart, distilling it even further: Lie big and stick to it, even if you look ridiculous.
In my book Dirty Rubles: An Introduction to Trump/Russia (2018), I argued that Donald’s Big Lie was the Russia lie: “Throughout the campaign, during the transition period, and after inauguration, Donald Trump and his surrogates vehemently denied meeting with Russians of any stripe, for any purpose. Every time they were asked about a connection between the campaign and the Kremlin, they shot it down.” And every time they shot it down, they—that is, Donald Trump, Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Hope Hicks, Mike Pence, etc.—were lying through their veneers. We can split hairs over terms like puppet, asset, useful idiot, and so forth, but that’s just semantics; Donald is, was, and always has been carrying water for the Kremlin.
The Big Lie about Russia was eventually supplanted by the Big Lie about the 2020 election being “stolen”—a Big Lie that led directly to Trump’s radicalized MAGA followers besieging the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as the House J6 Committee conclusively showed.
If you’re keeping score at home, Donald lies so egregiously that he’s successfully propagated more than one Big Lie. He’s out-Hitler’d Hitler!
The Reichstag, the Neo-Renaissance building that was the meeting place of the German parliament, caught fire on February 27, 1933—four weeks to the day after Hitler became chancellor. Haffner notes the fishiness of the Nazis getting “so worked up about the Reichstag. Up till then they had contemptuously called it a ‘hot air factory.’ Now it was suddenly the holy of holies that had been burned down.” Hitler and Goebbels turned up the Nazi outrage machine, rallying Germany around the fire, and using it as a pretext to seize dictatorial power.
(When MAGA influencers manufacture an outrage narrative—railing against Keurig machines, Bud Light, nonexistent “backlash” against Sydney Sweeney’s advertisements for shitty denim, the new Cracker Barrel logo, and so on—they are merely emulating, on a much smaller scale, Nazi weaponization of the Reichstag fire to radicalize the masses.)
Officially, the blaze was started by a Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe—a 24-year-old drifter from Holland who had been nearly blinded in a factory mishap. So: not exactly Jean-Claude Van Damme. The Nazis held that he was working on behalf of a covert, pervasive, and very dangerous Marxist insurgency. Even in the moment, this beggared belief—rather like Donald Trump’s wounded ear miraculously healing, as if it were (speaking of fire) the liver of Prometheus—and seemed, to anyone paying attention in 1933 Berlin, like a “false flag” operation.
Haffner was having drinks with some friends that night, as he recounts:
While we were arguing rather pointlessly and drinking Moselle wine the Reichstag was burning. Poor Marinus van der Lubbe was found in the building, equipped with every conceivable piece of identification. Outside, against a flaming backdrop, like a Wagnerian Wotan, Hitler uttered the memorable words, “If this is the work of the Communists, which I do not doubt, may God have mercy on them!” We had no inkling of all that. The radio was switched off. Around midnight we sleepily took the night buses to our various homes. At that very moment the raiding parties were already on their way to get their victims out of bed, in the first great wave of concentration-camp arrests: left-wing deputies and literary figures, unpopular doctors, officials, and lawyers.
The German press, like its current counterpart here in the U.S., was either incapable of asking questions or unwilling to ask them, and took the Nazi press releases at face value:
It was only the next morning that I read about the fire, and not until midday that I read about the arrests. Around the same time a decree of Hindenburg’s was promulgated. It abolished freedom of speech and confidentiality of the mail and telephone for all private individuals, while giving the police unrestricted rights of search and access, confiscation and arrest. That afternoon men with ladders went around, honest workmen, covering campaign posters with plain white paper. All parties of the left had been prohibited from any further election publicity. Those newspapers that still appeared reported all this in a fawning, fervently patriotic, jubilant tone. We had been saved! What good luck! Germany was free! Next Saturday all Germans would come together in a festival of national exaltation, their hearts swelling with gratitude! Get the torches and flags out!
Thus the press.
The relentless rantings of Hitler, the constant accusations of a Communist plot to overthrow the government, the Nazi insistence that the country was in grave danger—all of this stood in sharp contrast to what was happening on the ground. People had difficulty wrapping their heads around it all:
The streets were exactly the same as always. The cinemas were open. The law courts sat and heard cases. No sign of a revolution. At home people were a little confused, a little anxious, and tried to understand what was happening. That was difficult, very difficult, in such a short time.
So the Communists had burned down the Reichstag. Well, well. That could well be so, it was even to be expected. Funny, though, why they should choose the Reichstag, an empty building, where no one would profit from a fire. Well, perhaps it really had been intended as the “signal” for the uprising, which had been prevented by the “decisive measures” taken by the government. That was what the papers said, and it sounded plausible. Funny also that the Nazis got so worked up about the Reichstag. Up till then they had contemptuously called it a “hot air factory.” Now it was suddenly the holy of holies that had been burned down. Well, what suits their book, don’t you agree, my friend, that’s politics, isn’t it? Thank God we don’t understand it. The main thing is: the danger of a Communist uprising has been averted and we can sleep easy. Good night.
Never mind that the fire did not actually advance any sort of insurgency, Communist or otherwise, against the Nazis. Never mind that Marinus van der Lubbe was not some continental Che Guevara. Never mind that the Berlin fire chief, Walter Gempp, found evidence suggesting that the Nazis were responsible for the fire, and that some of his attempts to quickly put down the conflagration were thwarted. Or that Gempp was subsequently arrested and strangled to death in prison. Or, for that matter, that Hermann Göring once confessed to starting the fire himself.
The press did not touch any of that. The official explanation was quick, adamant, and more or less believable. So people bought it, hook, line, and das Bleigewicht—even those who knew better. Haffner notes that “perhaps the most interesting thing about the Reichstag fire is that the claim that it was the work of the Communists was so widely believed. Even the skeptics did not regard it as entirely incredible.”
Part of that was because the Communists were themselves so ridiculous, so ineffectual, so full of sound and fury but ultimately effete and craven—not unlike the Democrats these last nine years. Their rhetoric was empty; like the atmosphere inside the burning Reichstag, it was all hot air.
Even so,
It took a long time for the Germans to realize that the Communists had been sheep in wolves’ clothing. The Nazi myth of the Communist putsch that had been averted fell on fertile ground that had been prepared by the Communists themselves. Who would have believed that there was nothing behind the façade of raised fists? There are still some people in Germany who fall for the Communist scare, and that is the Communists’ own doing. The number who do so is not very large anymore; the poor showing of the German Communists is becoming common knowledge. Even the Nazis tend to avoid this particular tune, except with distinguished foreign visitors. They still fall for anything.
After all that, I do not see that one can blame the majority of Germans who, in 1933, believed that the Reichstag fire was the work of the Communists. What one can blame them for, and what shows their terrible collective weakness of character clearly for the first time during the Nazi period, is that this settled the matter. With sheepish submissiveness the German people accepted that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the constitution; as though it followed as a necessary consequence. If the Communists had burned down the Reichstag, it was perfectly in order that the government took “decisive measures”!
This “sheepish submissiveness” has been all too familiar here in the United States during the Trump era. Whether it’s Barack Obama being checkmated by Mitch McConnell with the doomed Merrick Garland SCOTUS nomination; Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries not grasping the severity of the threat to democracy posed by Trump; A.G. Garland’s feckless refusal to go hard at Donald in order to preserve “norms”; Jake Tapper and Dana Bash allowing Trump to Gish-gallop all over Biden in the first debate, not bothering to check even one of his countless lies; Joe Biden declining to use the mighty immunity powers granted him by the corrupt Roberts Court to save us from the orange menace; or the general reluctance of the press to report on Trump’s long ties to organized crime, the Kremlin, or Jeffrey Epstein, we have all seen a lifetime’s worth of pusillanimity from the “good guys.”
Our political leaders, almost to a man, have heretofore been poltroons.
A third Big Lie is now brewing, with a potential fourth waiting in the queue. After spending nine years using Jeffrey Epstein—and specifically, the specter of a powerful and secret cabal involving Bill and Hillary Clinton that traffics and rapes children whom Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell “recruited”—to radicalize the QAnon segment of the MAGA base, Trump is now desperate to have us all believe that he wasn’t Epstein’s “best friend” (as Epstein himself reported) for a decade and a half; that a creep who walked unannounced through the dressing room of Miss Teen USA and often expressed sexual urges towards his own teenage daughter was unaware of his buddy Epstein’s pedophilic predilections; that the many Epstein survivors accusing Donald of rape are all lying; that he didn’t realize his other gross pals in the modeling industry, John Casablancas and Jean-Luc Brunel, were sexual predators; and that, above all, his name does not appear in The Epstein Files—when, in truth, his name is mentioned so frequently that it took a thousand FBI agents weeks to redact every reference in the documents to Donald J. Trump.
This week, in an effort to clear the President’s name, Todd Blanche, Trump’s defense attorney who now works for the Justice Department (so called), released his interview with Donald’s old friend Ghislaine “I Wish Her Well” Maxwell, a serial perjurer who with Epstein managed the most notorious child sex tracking operation in recent history, if not ever. To the surprise of no one, Ghislaine testified that Trump “was a gentleman in all respects” and that she “never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way.”
Will the American people swallow this horseshit? Will they take the word of a serial perjurer who believes child rape is appropriate? Time will tell.
The fourth Big Lie involves our cities. Trump—along with his Minister of Propaganda, California native Stephen Miller, whom Molly Jong-Fast years ago dubbed “Santa Monica Goebbels,” which is perhaps a bit too on the nose—has been pushing a narrative that Washington, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Portland, and other “blue” cities are crime-ridden dystopian war zones. Although, thanks to Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, we can now remove Washington from that list!
“For the first time in their lives,” Miller said yesterday in the Oval Office, DC residents “can use the parks, they can walk on the streets. You have people who can walk freely at night without having to worry about being robbed or mugged. They are wearing their watches again. They’re wearing jewelry again. They’re carrying purses again. People have changed their whole loves in this city for fear of being murdered, mugged, and carjacked. It is a literal statement that President Trump has freed seven hundred thousand people in the city, who were living under the rule of criminals and thugs.”
Is Stephen Miller a failed novelist? Because this is all a fiction.
I went to Georgetown. I lived in DC for four years. In fact, my time in Washington was among the most dangerous periods in the city’s history, in terms of total homicides. More people were murdered in 1991, my freshman year, than in any other year from 1960 until now. Four hundred eighty-two homicides happened in the District in ‘91; last year there were 119.
So: Yes, Washington can be dangerous. Yes, you have to keep your wits about you when you’re walking around at night. Yes, innocent people get murdered. But to suggest that DC has more crime now than ever before is simply not true. And to insist, as Miller does, that Washington is not just the nation’s capital but the nation’s murder capital is statistically false. The murder rate is slightly higher in Louisville, 50 percent higher in Cincinnati and Memphis, twice as high in New Orleans, and a whopping four times higher in St. Louis.
But Republicans are not good at math (see also: tariffs). A healthy swath of the MAGA base has never set foot in New York or Los Angeles or Washington. How would they know that the DC National Guard, as The Five’s Jessica Tarlov wittily pointed out, is mostly patrolling the Sephora of Georgetown?
Constant reinforcement of this “cities bad” narrative on Fox News and other fascist media outlets is tremendously effective. (Related: I have found that a good way to determine if someone is MAGA without talking overtly about politics is to solicit their opinion of New York City; if the person in question has strong views about the A/C/E trains being like a scene from Running Man, they are probably a closet Trumper.)
What’s ominous about this “dangerous cities” Big Lie, even more so than the Epstein one, is that Trump has already sent the National Guard—and the Marines, in the case of Los Angeles—into U.S. cities, in obvious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. He intends to send more armed forces to Chicago and other “blue” cities, because: safety.
Without the false narrative that our cities are dangerous, are “killing fields” (as Trump put it yesterday), are war zones, are overrun by criminals and thugs, there is no pretext for unleashing the military on U.S citizens. For his military dictatorship play to work, the American people have to believe that having U.S. soldiers occupying Georgetown and Wicker Park and Brooklyn Heights is necessary to uphold the public order.
The Reichstag fire gave Hitler an excuse to exercise dictatorial power. Trump is clearly hoping that something chaotic will happen in one of these cities—Portland would be my guess, because MAGA seems to hate Portland, and not many people have been there compared with New York and Chicago—that will give him an excuse to declare martial law, as the Mike Flynns of the world have been begging him to do for years now.
Dictatorship is obviously on the President’s mind. “They say, ‘We don’t need him. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator, he’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying: ‘Maybe we like a dictator,’” Trump said yesterday. “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person.”
Every word a lie.
IV. The Coup
When, after years of futile trying, the American correspondent Dorothy Thompson was finally able to pin down the leader of the burgeoning Nazi Party for an interview in 1931, the article she wrote about the experience for Cosmopolitan, and the expansion of that article that became her 1932 book I Saw Hitler!, so thoroughly humiliated her subject that when he took power in 1933, Hitler personally ordered her expelled from the country—the 1930s equivalent of being blocked on Twitter by Donald Trump. She found him to be a loser, a joke, a “Little Man”:
When finally I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not.
It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.
He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.
He revealed to her his plans for turning Germany into a dictatorship:
On the subject of the constitution Hitler was more explicit, though there again, I had to interrupt and address to an unseen gallery. “I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.”
So that’s that for the Republic.
To her, the notion of a people surrendering their liberty seemed so ridiculous, she scoffed:
No longer was there to be a march on Berlin. The people were to “awaken” and Hitler’s movement was going to vote dictatorship in! In itself a fascinating idea. Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.
And yet, within two years of that interview, Hitler had done just that.
How did this happen? Why did a people, ostensibly sane, certainly powerful, quit without a fight?
The most alarming chapter of Defying Hitler, the one that made my blood run cold, is No. 20, in which Haffner gives a synopsis of Hitler’s rise to power. I have been comparing Trump to Hitler for years now, but even so, the parallels to Donald Trump’s current rise to power and Hitler’s nine decades earlier are startling.
We Americans are living through a MAGA revolution, in which the fundamental nature of our government is changing. But like Hitler’s “revolution,” it is not, technically speaking, a revolution at all:
Everything went strictly “by the book,” using means that were permitted by the constitution. At first there were “emergency decrees” by the president of the Reich, and later a bill was passed by a two-thirds majority of the Reichstag giving the government unlimited legislative powers, perfectly in accordance with the rules for changing the constitution.
Now, that is obviously shadow boxing, but even if we look at things as they really were, there is still room for doubt whether what happened that March really deserves the name of a revolution. From a simple, commonsense point of view, one would say that the essential characteristic of a revolution is that people violently attack the established order and its representatives, police, army, etc., and overcome them. It need not always be thrilling and glorious. It can be accompanied by atrocities, brutality, plunder, murder, and arson. At all events, we expect revolutionaries to be on the attack, to show courage, risk their lives. Barricades may be out of date, but some form of spontaneity, uprising, commitment, and insurrection seem to be an essential part of a genuine revolution.
None of that was to be found in March 1933. The events were a combination of the most disparate ingredients. What was completely absent 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.
In his boiling orange cauldron, Trump is cooking with the same ingredients Hitler used: terror, in the form of ICE kidnappings, FBI raids on the homes of his political enemies, bogus accusations of mortgage fraud for anyone who defies him, armed soldiers in the streets of our cities; celebration and rhetoric, with his birthday parade, his insistence that he is the greatest and the U.S. is succeeding like never before, the messages on his stupid red hats (“Trump Was Right About Everything,” said the one he wore the other day, in what might be the five most idiotic words ever formulated into a sentence); treachery, with his constant lies, the Bannonian “firehose of shit;” and, yes, a collective anxiety veering towards national nervous breakdown. We are, in a word, triggered.
Haffner explains that historically, terror comes from either violent uprising or violent crackdown. “The two forms of terror normally correspond to revolution and repression.” The Nazis, he writes, managed
to combine both forms of terror in a manner that invalidates both justifications. In 1933 the terror was practiced by a real bloodthirsty mass (namely the SA — the SS did not play a part until later), but this mass acted as “auxiliary police,” without any emotion or spontaneity, and without any risk to themselves. Rather, they acted from a position of complete security, under orders and with strict discipline. . . [The terror] did not take place in the excitement following a victorious battle or danger successfully overcome—nothing of the kind had happened. Nor was it an act of revenge for atrocities committed by the other side—there had been none. What happened was a nightmarish reversal of normal circumstances: robbers and murderers acting as the police force, enjoying the full panoply of state power, their victims treated as criminals, proscribed and condemned to death in advance.
Seven months into Donald’s second term, it still feels distasteful to apply the word terror to actions undertaken by the U.S. federal government. But what else is this? True, no one has been condemned to death yet in 2025 America, much less executed. But it’s only August. The Trump Redux is just in its third trimester. And Haffner gives us a glimpse of the ugly nature of this Rough Beast, slouching towards Mar-a-Lago to be born:
Even cruelty can have a magnificent aspect, if it is practiced with open commitment and idealism; when those who are cruel stand by their deeds with fervor—as happened in the French Revolution and the Russian and Spanish civil wars. In contrast, the Nazis never showed anything but the sly, pale, cowardly face of a murderer denying his crime. While they were systematically torturing and murdering their defenseless victims, they daily declared in fine, noble words that not a single hair of anyone’s head would be harmed, and that never before had a revolution shed less blood or been conducted more humanely. Indeed, only a few weeks after the atrocities began, a law was passed that forbade anyone, under pain of severe penalties, to claim, even in the privacy of his own home, that atrocities were taking place.
Of course, it was not the intention to keep the atrocities secret. In that case they would not have served their purpose, which was to induce general fear, alarm, and submission. On the contrary, the purpose was to intensify the terror by cloaking it in secrecy and making even talking about it dangerous. An open declaration of what was happening in SA cellars and concentration camps—in a public speech or in the press—might still have led to desperate resistance, even in Germany. The secret whispered rumors, “Be careful, my friend! Do you know what happened to X?” were much more effective in breaking people’s backbones.
Think of Stephen Miller, of JD Vance, of Marco Rubio. Think of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth. Think of the sycophants in Congress who appear on Fox News to sing his hosannas. Think of the disgusting liars in his Cabinet: Lutnick, Bessent, Duffy, Zeldin. Think of the talking heads on the state TV news channels, with their helmets of hair and caked-on makeup. Think of the tech bros. Think of his sons. All of them, without exception, show “the sly, pale, cowardly face of a murderer denying his crime.”
Nazis are gonna Nazi. There’s nothing to be done to change their ghoulish nature. A monster is a monster. But in 1933 Germany, the Nazis were a minority party. What of the others? Why did they so readily lay down their proverbial swords?
For Hitler to assume power as he did—as Haffner explains, with unveiled contempt— required
the cowardly treachery of all party and organizational leaders, to whom the 56 percent of the population who had voted against the Nazis on March 5 had entrusted themselves. This terrible and decisive event was not much noticed by the outside world. Naturally, the Nazis had no interest in drawing attention to it, since it would considerably devalue their “victory,” and as for the traitors themselves: well, of course, they did not want attention drawn to it. Nevertheless, it is finally only this betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.
The betrayal was complete, extending from left to right.
In Germany, different opposition parties—Communists, Social Democrats, the Catholic Zentrum party—capitulated. And “the German nationalists, the right-wing conservatives, who venerated ‘honor’ and ‘heroism’ as the central characteristics of their program,” Haffner laments—and we can almost feel him shaking his head in disgust—“Oh God, what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward! . . . They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews, the persecution of Christians. They were not even bothered when their own party was prohibited, and their own members arrested.”
I don’t have the time or the space to list all the Democrats, the Independents, the moderate Republicans, even the radical Catholic extremists who knew damned well that Trump is closer to the Antichrist than to anything resembling a Christian but went along with him anyway, who have failed us mightily and perhaps fatally. To that roster we can add the media barons, the captains of industry, Silicon Valley billionaires, white-shoe lawyers, Ivy League university administrators. They are nothing less than American Pétains, Vichy traitors, the lot of them.
“We will never bend the knee to far right extremists,” Hakeem Jeffries tweeted this week, as if “we” hadn’t already done so. Far right extremists? What does that even mean? What lame focus group was that phrase lifted from?
“This terrible moral bankruptcy of the opposition leadership is a fundamental characteristic of the March ‘revolution’ of 1933,” Haffner observes. “It made the Nazi victory exceedingly easy.”
So, too, here. Those U.S. political leaders who have behaved with honor from 2016 through 2024, who have done everything they possibly could to throw sand in the fascist gears, could fit comfortably at my dining room table. Who could have predicted, nine years ago, that the active member of Congress that would show the most courage in standing up to Trump would be Liz Cheney?
The chapter concludes with perhaps the most chilling passage in a book full of them:
Hundreds of thousands, who had up until then been opponents, joined the Nazi Party in March 1933. . . . They did it for many reasons, often for a whole tangled web of them; but however hard one looks, one will not find a single solid, positive, durable reason among them—not one that can pass muster. In each individual case the process of becoming a Nazi showed the unmistakable symptoms of nervous collapse.
The simplest and, if you looked deeper, nearly always the most basic reason was fear. Join the thugs to avoid being beaten up. Less clear was a kind of exhilaration, the intoxication of unity, the magnetism of the masses. Many also felt a need for revenge against those who had abandoned them. Then there was a peculiarly German line of thought: “All the predictions of the opponents of the Nazis have not come true. They said the Nazis could not win. Now they have won. Therefore the opponents were wrong. So the Nazis must be right.” There was also (particularly among intellectuals) the belief that they could change the face of the Nazi Party by becoming a member, even now shift its direction. Then, of course, many just jumped on the bandwagon, wanting to be part of a perceived success. Finally, among the more primitive, inarticulate, simpler souls there was a process that might have taken place in mythical times when a beaten tribe abandoned its faithless god and accepted the god of the victorious tribe as its patron. Saint Marx, in whom one had always believed, had not helped. Saint Hitler was obviously more powerful. So let’s destroy the images of Saint Marx on the altars and replace them with images of Saint Hitler. Let us learn to pray: “It is the Jews’ fault” rather than “It is the capitalists’ fault.” Perhaps that will redeem us.
The sequence of events is, as you see, not so unnatural. It is wholly within the normal range of psychology, and it helps to explain the almost inexplicable. The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called “breeding.” This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle, and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in the Germans. As a nation they are soft, unreliable, and without backbone. That was shown in March 1933. At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.
The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.
The United States of 2025 is not an exact mimeograph of Germany of 1933, of course. We did not lose a world war and have to pay prohibitive reparations. We did not suffer a volatile bout of hyperinflation. Our population is larger, more diverse, and more spread out over a lot more land. Our dollar remains, at least for now, the world’s reserve currency. We’ve been a united nation for a quarter millennium, whereas Germany had only been unified for 73 years when Hitler came along.
But for as long as Donald Trump is in the White House—and probably JD Vance, too, if that couch-lusting fascist winds up succeeding Donald—the United States will remain the nightmare of the rest of the world.
V. The End
While the many parallels between 1933 Germany and the U.S. of 2025 are unsettling, if not outright terrifying, the overlap, as discussed, is not total. There are plenty of differences. It is not the same time, not the same place, not the same cast of characters.
First and foremost, we have, for the moment, avoided mass violence. The MAGA Reign of Terror may be coming soon, but it’s not here just yet. Fascism has arrived, yes, but it’s in a larval stage—vulnerable, still relatively easy to destroy. The longer this madness goes on, however, the harder it will be to stop.
We have not yet gone to war—although Trump seems determined to unleash the military on the American public, or the Mexican cartels, or even, perhaps, the people of Greenland. So far, all we have is the National Guard sightseeing in Washington (which, incidentally, is exactly what the Nazi soldiers did when they first got to occupied Paris.)
I have slagged the Democrats, and rightly so. But in 2025, the United States does have strong leaders in important and powerful positions. Gavin Newsom, lately Trump’s bugbear, presides over the world’s fourth-largest economy; the U.S. needs California more than California needs the U.S. Minnesota’s Tim Walz has been a strong resistance voice since Kamala Harris chose him to be her running mate. JB Pritzker of Illinois has not been shy about criticizing Dear Leader. Kathy Hochul, my governor here in New York, has been quieter than the others, but no less effective. And Zohran Mamdani, God bless him, is running one of the best political campaigns in recent memory, and stands poised to become mayor of the country’s largest—and wealthiest—city.
There was no equivalent to a state governor in Nazi Germany, and no opposition leaders as charismatic or effective as Newsom, Mamdani, et. al. This is vital, because if Trump is to be stopped—indicted, arrested, arraigned, convicted, sentenced—it will not be at the hand of his corrupt crony Pam Bondi at the DOJ. Donald controls the federal government, yes, but the states still wield enormous power—enough, perhaps, to take him down.
Hitler was canny in his recruiting. He hired smart, capable generals. Indeed, when Trump grumbles about his generals not being up to snuff, what he’s really doing is lowkey glorifying the Nazi military brass. But Donald hires primarily for loyalty. And MAGA loyalists are not the cream of the crop; Pete Hegseth is no von Manstein. Most of these people are clowns.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler turned 43. Physically, he was at the peak of his powers. In 2025, Donald Trump drags a morbidly obese, broken-down body into its eightieth year of life. He looks like shit. His ankles are swollen, his hands are bruised. He falls asleep in public. He rambles incoherently. He routinely forgets names and faces he should know. And he stinks to high heaven. As Noel Casler told me years ago, Donald wears a diaper because he cannot control his bowels; the stench emanating from him these days seems to be getting worse; all the gold plating in Versailles cannot change the fact that the Oval Office smells like a raw sewage plant.
Lie big and stick to it, even if you look ridiculous? Well, Trump looks more ridiculous than ever. Running for a third term, is he? The actuarial tables suggest that Trump will not make it through his second.
The other day, in one of his vomitous Truth Social upchuckings, Trump mocked his former Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, calling him “Steve ‘Manouychin.’” Probably he was just poking fun at his unusual surname, but nonetheless, I googled “Manouychin,” and thus learned about Missak Manouchian, an Armenian-French poet who was a leader of the French resistance during the Second World War.
This led me down yet another Nazi rabbit hole, and I wound up reading Ian Ousby’s Occupation: The Ordeal of France 1940-1944, a brilliant book by a British writer about the Nazi occupation of France.
“The peculiar tragedy of France in 1940,” Ousby writes, “was that finger-pointing was not just a brief hysterical outburst, like the vogue for atrocity stories about the advancing enemy. It was institutionalized by the choice of Pétain as leader. In him and in the men he chose to serve him, the French found a government which, for all its rhetoric of unity and renewal, depended at root on finding scapegoats. Its characteristic policies would be denunciation and the witch-hunt. And so the history of the Occupation, which began with the humiliation of the French by the Germans in 1940, would develop into a humiliation—and soon afterwards the persecution—of the French by the French.”
Collaborators are morally lower than occupiers, because they are traitors, full stop. When the smoke clears and the dust settles, how does a nation reconcile with the fact that so many of its citizens willingly and at times eagerly collaborated with the enemy? How does a country recover from such dishonor? Can it recover?
“In the long run,” Haffner writes, “revolutions have thus always strengthened the nations concerned. Just consider the vast quantity of heroism, death-defying courage, and human greatness exhibited by the Jacobins and the Royalists in the French Revolution—admittedly against a backdrop of cruelty and violence. It is the same with the Republicans and Franco supporters in Spain. Whatever the outcome, the courage of the fighters remains a source of strength in the mind of the nation. Instead of that source of strength, today’s Germans have the memory of shame, cowardice, and weakness. That will inevitably have consequences one day, perhaps even lead to the dissolution of the German state.”
Today’s younger Americans especially—Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha—will have the same shameful, cowardly, weak national memory. Will it lead to the dissolution of the United States? And: should it? Would that be preferable to living under a dictatorship?
As a people, Americans are adept at turning the page, at not looking back, at ignoring the ugliness of our history, at not demanding accountability, at not atoning for our national sins. If we survive Trump’s second term—as a democracy, but also as living humans; remember, bloated whale-beheader Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has gutted the NIH and the CDC, and another pandemic on his watch will likely bring mass death—we shall have to look back. We shall have to reconcile with what we’ve done, just as the French had to after Vichy fell, as the Germans had to after Hitler blew his brains out. Not just as a nation, but as individuals, we shall have to account for our actions. We Americans all know, now, alas, what we would have done if we were living in Germany in 1933—because we live in the United States in 2025. It’s not too late to make good. Resistance is not linear.
The Germans, Haffner writes, were “under a spell.” The same is true of tens of millions of Americans, who “live a drugged life in dream world,” who cannot see Donald Trump for what he really is. “They think they are scaling high mountains, when in reality they are crawling through a swamp. As long as the spell lasts, there is almost no antidote.”
We must—we must—break the spell.
Photo credit: Top: Stephen Miller the other day, via CSPAN. Bottom: AP. March 1933, Berlin, Germany. Four Nazi troops sing in front of the Woolworth Co. store during the movement to boycott Jewish presence in Germany. Hitlerites across Germany thought the Woolworth Co. founder was Jewish.
Thanks to Oliver Pretzel for granting me permission to use long excerpts from his father’s Defying Hitler—which, again, I encourage readers to buy and read.
Absolutely essential reading. I compared Trump's use of the National Guard to Hitler's SA just last night in my column, "It's getting very, very serious." We are on the same page of the same book, as it turns out. Good one.
Trust me Greg, I’ve known who Trump was for decades. A lying, manipulative, self entitled, selfish, amoral predator; with dictator like aspirations. A man who likely at his core, if there ever was any inclination towards a moral imperative, lost it in the first decade of his life. And this time he has surrounded himself with an administration who are driven by the same lack of moral compass, greed, jealousy and a thirst for deliberate, institutionalized cruelty. My hope is that they cannibalize one another.