The Tea Party loves to claim that Obama and a cabal of “socialists” are bringing us to the brink of a totalitarian state. Fox News commentator Glen Beck incongruously adds his own conspiracy theories, in which he obsessively tries to link liberal Democrats with the Third Reich. But for anyone who has actually studied history, Fox News and Glen Beck have more in common with German Fascism than the liberalism they attack on a daily basis.
The Weimar Republic began in 1919 after the collapse of the monarchy. Consisting of a coalition of the Social Democratic Party, the Catholic Center Party, and the German Democratic Party, it formed a social democratic government which attempted to provide a safety net for its citizens. That is, until it could no longer pay German war reparations. By 1923 inflation had wiped out the middle class and the Nazi Party, which had formed in 1919, was now a movement of angry, frightened people. In 1925 presidential elections brought back former monarchist and Social Democrat von Hindenburg, who presided over a few years of relative stability.
But the Great Depression of 1929 plunged Germany into massive economic crisis, and by then the Nazi Party had begun to attract serious money from German industrialists. By September 1930, the Social Democrats, who had previously controlled parliament, were down to 37% of the popular vote, and the Nazi Party’s popularity had spiked 700% to become the second most powerful party. In March 1932 the presidential election candidates were von Hindenburg, Hitler, and Thaelmann. In little over a year the Nazi Party had doubled.
Several months later, parliamentary elections led to a Nazi majority, and Leftists were purged. In February of 1933, as we now know, the Nazis torched the Reichstag and blamed it on the Left. Hitler then asked for dictatorial powers, which were granted by both remaining (liberal and conservative) parties. By May of 1933 labor unionists were among the first inmates of newly-built concentration camps. Kristallnacht, which was the beginning of the end for Jews, did not happen for another five years. It had all started with an attack on workers and social democracy.
The obvious question is: how did the Nazis gain such influence so quickly?
The Nazi Party was not established by Hitler, who was only it’s 55th member. It had been created by hyper-nationalists who believed the Weimar Republic’s social democrats were out of touch with populist sentiments. The early Nazis opposed an “internationalism” they associated with the rise of European social democracy, the League of Nations, and a global economy. They were proponents of “Voelkisch” movements that sought to unify Germans around an idealized (and somewhat artificial) German nationalism established by von Bismarck, which had existed for only thirty years.
Hitler’s platform for the Nazi Party was described in his Twenty Five Points, which included abrogating the treaty of Versailles, imposing punitive measures for foreigners working in Germany, the right to annex territory, the expulsion of foreigners, immigration reform, nationalization of the press, shutting down foreign-language publications, discrimination against Jews, nationalization of trusts, and increasing old-age pensions. Nazism opposed international finance, admired mercantilism, and claimed to hate both capitalism and socialism. Nazis complained that Germans were under attack by Judeo-Bolshevism: Foreigners were out to take over their world, and Jews were the worst of the lot.
The Nazi Party should have, by any reasonable expectations, remained a fringe group of extremists. But Nazism gained great strength among former supporters of the conservative German Democratic Party, particularly among Protestants in Schleswig-Holstein, Pomerania and East Prussia, and particularly among older voters who wanted to return to “traditional German” values. The greatest number of its voters came from the broken middle class, although 40% came from wage laborers.
Despite Nazism’s ideological opposition to capitalism, industrialists supported its anti-union positions. The Nazi Party obtained funding from industrialists like Hugo Stinnes, Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler, Adolf Kirdorf, coal mining and steel magnates, a group of Nuremburg industrialists, and international cartels like I.G. Farben, AEG, and Royal Dutch Shell. 1933 records from just one bank show contributions to Hitler from Ford Motors, German General Electric, Telefunken, AEG, I.G. Farben, and the Association of Mining Interests.
Support for Nazism and its principles was not just a German phenomenon. In 1922 Henry Ford printed half a million copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and ran a series for several years in his “Dearborn Independent” titled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.” In 1937 Thomas Watson of IBM and a delegation from the Chamber of Commerce met with Hitler. Business as usual would continue with der Fuehrer.
Besides censorship and shutting down almost 4000 newspapers by the end of the war, dominating the public discourse meant making sure propaganda was carefully controlled by official sources. The Nazi Party’s official paper, the “Voelkisher Beobachter,” was not the only outlet for Nazi propaganda. “Der Stuermer” was oriented toward the Hitlerjugend. “Das Reich” was established by Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister. “Der Angriff” was the Berlin Nazi daily. But the “Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” was the Fox News of its day and was owned by the Stinnes family, which also directly funded Hitler. This p
aper was among the earliest outlets for Nazi views.
Some of the Nazi party’s tactics will be familiar to today’s Democratic congressmen. The Nazi Party’s “Sturmabteilung” (disruption section) was originally intended for breaking up meetings of its political opponents. Later, this group, which consisted of various militia members, became known as “brownshirts” or “storm troopers” and was used for physical attacks upon its opponents.
So when Fox News propagandist Glen Beck fires up Middle America and the Tea Party with disinformation, I think of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and the Sturmabteilung. When I see legislation like Arizona’s SB1070, I think of the Twenty Five Points.
When I see Muslims vilified on a daily basis, I think of Jews in post-Weimar Germany. When I see Americans slamming the UN and multilateralism while promoting militarism, I think of 1920 German views on the League of Nations and its abrogation of the treaty of Versailles. When I hear about Americans who are tired of “foreigners” building mosques or speaking Spanish in “their” country, I think of the German “Voelkish” movement. When I hear about “Islamofascism” I recall the Nazi phrase “Judeo-Bolshevism.”
And when I think of the old, white, Protestant, frightened, misinformed, angry Tea Party activists longing for a return to traditional American values, I think of the Germans who all too willingly let Hitler destroy their nation.
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