Timothy W. Ryback, a Dutch historian and the director of the Hague-based Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, has written numerous excellent books about the Holocaust, including his latest, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. Ryback’s 12-month snapshot of a pivotal period in Germany’s descent into totalitarianism carefully and persuasively captures the nuance of what might have been had a determined, monomaniacal Hitler not steamrolled the entire political class.
Indeed, perhaps surprisingly, the Nazis’ standing in late 1932 was parlous, and the Weimar system squandered a golden opportunity to stamp them out entirely. The party’s rise had been meteoric: Membership exploded from 27,000 in 1925 to 800,000 in 1931, and the July 31, 1932, Reichstag election saw the Nazis secure a stunning 37% vote share, amounting to 230 seats in the 600-member body. In August, Reich President Paul von Hindenburg summoned Hitler to intensive discussions about forming a governing coalition, urging him to embrace the Weimar spirit. This effort flopped abjectly, though, as Hitler spurned Hindenburg’s offer, prompting the elder statesman’s warning “to conduct yourself in opposition in an honorable manner and remember your responsibility and duty to the Fatherland.”
Alas, honor, respect, and responsibility held no place in the Nazi worldview. “The aspirational sentiments embedded in this foundational federal document,” Ryback writes of the Reich Constitution, “appeared to be failing on every count, thanks at least in part to the fearmongering and fomenting of one man.” So it was that a triumphant Hitler unapologetically declared his intention to employ democratic means to destroy democracy. “The National Socialist movement will achieve power in Germany by methods permitted by the present Constitution — in a purely legal way,” the Fuhrer told the New York Times. “It will then give the German people the form of organization and government that suits our purposes.” Or, as Goebbels put it, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.”
But the Nazis suffered significant reversals during the second half of 1932. When Nazi opposition, combined with Communist intransigency, gridlocked the Reichstag, Hindenburg dissolved parliament and called new elections for Nov. 6. Perhaps weary of Hitler’s antics, the German electorate handed the Nazis what one newspaper called a “crushing defeat.” The party lost 2 million voters, including tens of thousands in its traditional strongholds, and its coffers were severely depleted. “Hitler’s movement was essentially bankrupt,” Ryback contends, “not only financially but also politically.” The following month, local elections saw an even more precipitous erosion of Nazi support. “Hitler’s decline began with August 13,” the mainstream daily Vossische Zeitung wrote, “slowly at first, then with increasing speed.” Many Germans were cautiously breathing sighs of relief, while Goebbels lamented that “the situation in the Reich is catastrophic.”
Yet the winds shifted again in early 1933, as Kurt von Schleicher, the newly elected Reich chancellor, sought to cobble together a Cabinet comprising a wide range of centrists and traditional right-wingers in opposition to the Social Democrats and Communists. To this end, he sought to install as vice chancellor, and cleave from the Nazis, Gregor Strasser, Hitler’s key rival within the party and a relative moderate (who nevertheless railed against Jews and the Weimar Constitution; after all, Strasser was still a Nazi). But after a slightly better electoral showing for the Nazis in January in the tiny central province of Lippe, an empowered Hitler scotched the Strasser plan and demanded from Hindenburg the chancellorship for himself.
A thwarted Schleicher, in turn, urged the 85-year-old war hero president, exhausted by the unending political strife engulfing his country, to dissolve the Reichstag, suspend the constitution, and declare a state of emergency. But Hindenburg refused his former protégé’s request, prompting Schleicher to resign and empowering Franz von Papen, the center-right previous chancellor who himself had been ousted by the Nazi-Communist alliance, to broker a new coalition. Papen turned to Hitler and offered him the chancellorship, but only in alliance with other, more centrist parties from the Right who Papen, naively, hoped would restrain him. “In two months,” Papen vowed, “we will have pressed Hitler into a corner so tight that he’ll squeak.” Instead, two months later, a rejuvenated Nazi Party won big in parliamentary elections marred by the Reichstag fire — a vote that would be the Reich’s last. The Fuhrer had escaped his corner.
Ryback wisely doubts “whether any democracy could have withstood an assault on its structures and processes by a demagogue as fiercely determined as Hitler” or whether a “better-designed constitution,” “a less polarized electorate,” or “a political leadership more committed to democratic values” wouldn’t have succumbed so easily. In short, Ryback meticulously chronicles the tragedy of Germany’s liberal collapse while attributing all due weight to the uniqueness of the Nazi threat without drawing strained parallels to shortcomings in the American political system.
But even Ryback’s sparkling analysis of Germany’s fateful year has been enlisted in the service of aims not its own. I first encountered the book earlier this year when I read Adam Gopnik’s review in the New Yorker. Gopnik focuses his analysis on what he labels “Hitler’s establishment enablers,” such as Schleicher and Papen and the conservative media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, who “regarded Hitler as manic and unreliable but found him essential for the furtherance of their common program.” In Gopnik’s view, the Nazis rose to power because, like today’s Republicans have done with former President Donald Trump, center-right leaders saw Hitler as someone they could do business with. Gopnik also highlights efforts by Western journalists to “normalize the Nazi ascent,” including by depicting Hitler as “an out-of-his-depth simpleton [who] was not the threat he seemed to be.”
The implications for today’s woebegone politics are plain. “We see through a glass darkly,” Gopnik argues, “as patterns of authoritarian ambition seem to flash before our eyes: the demagogue made strong not by conviction but by being numb to normal human encouragements and admonitions; the aging center left; the media lords who want something like what the demagogue wants but in the end are controlled by him; the political maneuverers who think they can outwit the demagogue; the resistance and sudden surrender.” Gopnik’s review doesn’t use the word “Trump,” but it might as well have. He blasts the paladins of the contemporary center-right who “fall back on familiarities and make faint offers to authoritarians and say a firm and final no — and then wake up a few days later and say, ‘Well, maybe this time, it might all work out, and look at the other side!’” Maybe, Gopnik argues, Hitler’s rise wasn’t so extraordinary after all. Maybe it can happen here.
And in using Hitler this way, nudge-nudging about Trump or outright screaming about him any time the subject of Nazism comes up since 2016, Gopnik is very much not the exception. Ryback, in fact, is the exception in taking Hitler historically seriously rather than putting him to present political use. For instance: “We tend to see Hitler as a genocidal mass murderer, which of course he was, but not so much as a populist,” the Dutch academic Henk de Berg, author of the new book Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying, told a Guardian reporter in June. “I thought looking at it through the perspective of Trump can help us wrap our heads around the idea as to why so many people actually supported Hitler and vice versa.”
Why do so many contemporary scholars insist, like Gopnik and de Berg, on likening our current perilous political situation to that of Weimar Germany? Why do they insist on comparing the incomparable horrors of the Holocaust and the incurable evil of its leaders to the problematic and disturbing but hardly existentially threatening state of modern-day Western liberal society? At the surface level, it’s easy to understand: the lazy impulse to discredit argumentative or political opponents by drawing surface-level comparisons between them and Hitler was first described by Leo Strauss in 1951, if the Wikipedia entry for what internet culture later named the “Reductio ad Hitlerum” is to be believed. But as we will see, this tendency by even the most highly pedigreed historians transcends mere abhorrence of Donald Trump, Brexit, and Marine Le Pen and has its psychological roots in something more troubling about the way that liberalism sees the world — or insists on not seeing it.
Perhaps the most discreditable exemplar of the propensity for faulty Hitler analogies is Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and a renowned scholar of the Holocaust, whose lessons he urges his readers to apply to contemporary society. For Snyder, almost everything deplorable about contemporary society can be attributed to an impulse toward Nazism. In his 2015 book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Snyder argues that “the world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler’s time, and to which Hitler responded.” Dedicating several chapters to an in-depth and fascinating analysis of the Nazi concept of Lebensraum, Snyder attempts to caution us against adopting Hitler’s approach to resolving 21st-century challenges. (An earlier book, Bloodlands, likened Hitler’s and Stalin’s respective reigns of terror.)
Today, Snyder argues, with climate change intensifying global conflict over dwindling resources, we must steel ourselves against scapegoating vulnerable groups. “In a scenario of mass killing that resembled the Holocaust,” he writes, “leaders of a developed country might follow or induce panic about future shortages and act preemptively, specifying a human group as the source of an ecological problem, destroying other states by design or by accident.” In Snyder’s view, scarcity could cause even mature democracies to target ethnic groups. Overall, Snyder insists that “we share Hitler’s planet and several of his preoccupations; we have changed less than we think. We like our living space, we fantasize about destroying governments, we denigrate science, we dream of catastrophe.” Indeed, “if we think that we are victims of some planetary conspiracy, we edge towards Hitler.” (As stretches go, “we share Hitler’s planet” is perhaps the only argument even thinner than the canonical Reductio ad Hitlerum, Do you know who else was a vegetarian?)
Snyder published Black Earth in 2015, shortly before a certain real estate mogul and television star descended a now-famous escalator to declare a long-shot bid for the presidency. And as Trump was elected as the 45th president, Snyder found a new and highly popular target for his favorite analogy. His 2017 book On Tyranny, which became an instant favorite of the #Resistance, urged readers not to “obey in advance” the wishes of would-be autocrats, cautioning that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given” and exhorting everyday Americans to “defend institutions.”
Then, following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Snyder argued in a lengthy New York Times essay titled “The American Abyss” that “post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president.” Less subtly, he contended that:
Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse, or “lying press.” Like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating.
All that prevented Trump from embracing and applying a complete version of fascism, Snyder argued, were the would-be dictator’s own personal shortcomings: egotism, anger, and rank disorganization. He echoed these themes in other op-ed pieces and his 2021 book, The Road to Unfreedom. Most recently, he lamented that the Trump-Vance “platform is essentially one of dismantling the American state into chaos.”
Snyder, however, is not a unique case but rather one example of a type. Historians of this type found after Trump’s election that TV appearances, book sales, and attention came along with drawing connections between Hitler’s time and place and our own — never mind the damage to the integrity of historical truth itself or public trust in academic historical credentials. Another exhibit in disgrace is the decorated presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who has fallen prey to a similar temptation. A trustee of the White House Historical Association and a board member of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Beschloss has authored or edited more than 10 award-winning books and represents the quintessential Beltway establishmentarian. But the 2016 election triggered a break from his staid professional ways and thrust him into an anti-Trump role that leveraged his historical knowledge. “Until roughly 2017,” he acknowledged years later, “I was not inclined to take public positions on current events. And that is because I did not feel that democracy was under immediate and serious threat.”
No longer. “Conspiracy theories,” he contended, “bring down the temples of government including rule of law and institutions of democracy — that’s been there consistently all this time. This was an important, urgent danger and we might see it explode during our lifetimes.” As Michael Schaffer wrote in a 2022 Politico Magazine profile, Beschloss’s Twitter feed is replete with “photos of Mussolini and Hitler, allegations of fascism and racism, insinuations of ex-presidential criminality.” In 2018, he told Vox that “one sure thing about Donald Trump is that he will grab for as much power as is available to him.” In the wake of Jan. 6, he posted photos of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and the Reichstag fire.
Urgent and immediate turned out to be bad prognostications, but seven years after Trump first took to the Oval Office and four years after Trump neglected to take a golden opportunity to seize pretextual emergency powers in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic, Beschloss has not achieved any humility about his ability to understand the present moment in its historical context. Recently, Beschloss has sounded the alarm about the potential Nazification of the 2024 presidential contest. In a December 2023 MSNBC appearance, he likened Trump’s (odious) comment that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” to Hitlerian rhetoric. “For Donald Trump as a former president and possible future president to use that language,” he tutted, “to know that that language led to the Holocaust, he knows what he’s doing, and he thinks it works.”
Following more loathsome Trumpist pronouncements in March, Beschloss again waxed indignant. “In a way,” he said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in March, “Donald Trump has made it easier because when he tells you he’ll be a dictator for a day — we all know that dictators don’t resign after a day. When he uses the word ‘bloodbath,’ yes, it was in the context of an automobile industry speech, but he knew exactly what he was saying.” The most plausible reading of Trump’s comments is that he was referring to firing executive branch employees, a plan to lessen, not increase, the powers of the office of the president relative to Congress on day one of his next administration. As reprehensible as many of Trump’s statements may be, in my opinion, outrageous or trashy rhetorical choices do not presage another Holocaust. Like Snyder, Beschloss’s historical acumen far outstrips his understanding of contemporary politics.
And it’s not just #Resistance darlings who’ve succumbed to the modern Hitlerism sirens. In The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, an otherwise brilliant book surveying underappreciated aspects of the Shoah, which I reviewed favorably for Commentary early this year, the British historian Dan Stone also fell victim to the presentist impulse. “How can we argue that Nazism and what it means have been refuted,” he wondered, “when we witness the rise of the far right across the world, from Brazil to Poland, the shocking slide of America’s Republican Party into fascism, and the triumph or threat of authoritarian policies in many countries, from Myanmar to Georgia?”
But why do some of our most historically literate observers surrender to such deeply flawed analogies? Why will they rely on the thinnest connection, if only that connection runs between Trump and Hitler? Have they simply been radicalized by Trump’s rise? Or is something deeper at work?
In his 2003 masterpiece Terror and Liberalism, historian and political philosopher Paul Berman advanced a bold claim: Contemporary liberals struggle to truly understand totalitarian movements precisely because totalitarians are so inveterately irrational and unyielding. How can it be, modern-day secular scholars wonder of radical Islamists, for example, that certain belief systems preach hatred of a religious or ethnic group? There must be some logical explanation underlying these beliefs.
Through an assiduous study of In the Shade of the Quran, the mid-20th-century Egyptian Muslim scholar Sayyid Qutb’s 30-volume “exegetical extravaganza” — which Berman memorably describes as “a vast and elegantly constructed architecture of thought and imagination, a work of true profundity, vividly written, wise, broad, indignant, sometimes demented, bristly with hatred, medieval, modern, tolerant, intolerant, cruel, urgent, cranky, tranquil, grave, poetic, learned, analytic, moving in some passages, a work large enough to create its own shade” — Berman concludes that modern-day liberals simply cannot process the idea of spiritual beliefs that lead to violence. It just does not compute.
Berman highlights totalitarian “movements of the extreme right and extreme left — Fascists, Phalangists, Nazis, and Communists — each movement with its own set of paranoid conspiracy theories, its own apocalyptic fantasies, and its own fashion of celebrating death.” These movements “spoke to powerful feelings about modern life, and their inspiration spread outward to the world, and this did not exclude the regions nearest at hand, namely, the Muslim countries.” But to the Western democratic mind, the more egregious the abuses of these extremist movements, the worse the behavior supposedly triggering them must have been. The more gruesome the murder, whether by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem or a gas chamber kommandant in Auschwitz, the more appalling the act that must have provoked it. Berman decries “how some of the liberals and radicals of half a century ago, in their fierceness, lost the ability in later years to make sound and nuanced judgments.”
The same can be said of the profoundly, tragically unsound contemporary tendency to liken the Holocaust to today’s significantly troubled, but fundamentally different, political arena: Even those historians most substantially steeped in the horrors of the Holocaust struggle to relate to its essentially irrational character. There simply must be lessons we can draw from the Shoah and from other totalitarian movements to apply to the problems we encounter in Western liberal democracies because, otherwise, there is simply no sense in the world.
Making sense, adducing rationality, and locating key takeaways: These are the impulses of professional academics, as they should be. And yet, some events simply defy logic. If there are analogies to be drawn between 1930s Germany and 2020s America, they might just help us unlock the mysteries of Nazi appeal. If economic and political conditions can lead ordinary Westerners to yield to authoritarian impulses, then maybe Hitler’s appeal makes a bit more sense.
We must, however, resist this seductive instinct in favor of recognizing Hitler, Nazism, fascism, radical Islamism, and other totalitarian movements for what they are: deeply irrational, religious (or quasi-religious), evil movements aimed squarely at the human subconscious, commanding us, implicitly and explicitly, to accede to our basest impulses. Any effort to, if you will, “normalize” such behavior by comparing it to the machinations of the contemporary Right, foolhardy and even malicious they are, is bound to lead us astray. Undermining the uniqueness of the Holocaust by analogizing it to today’s messy politics diminishes both the analogists and their subjects, including, most notably, the victims of the Shoah. But it does make liberal historians feel better.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
