THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY
Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic
By Benjamin Carter Hett
Illustrated. 280 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $30.
We ask about the rise of the Nazis from what we think is a great distance. We take for granted that the Germans of the 1930s were quite different from ourselves, and that our consideration of their errors will only confirm our superiority. The opposite is the case. Although Benjamin Carter Hettmakes no comparisons between Germany then and the United States now in “The Death of Democracy,” his extremely fine study of the end of constitutional rule in Germany, he dissolves those comforting assumptions. He is not discussing a war in which Germans were enemies or describing atrocities that we are sure we could never commit. He presents Hitler’s rise as an element of the collapse of a republic confronting dilemmas of globalization with imperfect instruments and flawed leaders. With careful prose and fine scholarship, with fine thumbnail sketches of individuals and concise discussions of institutions and economics, he brings these events close to us.
The Nazis, in Hett’s account, were above all “a nationalist protest movement against globalization.” Even before the Great Depression brought huge unemployment to Germany, the caprice of the global economy offered an opportunity to politicians who had simple answers. In their 1920 program, the Nazis proclaimed that “members of foreign nations (noncitizens) are to be expelled from Germany.” Next would come autarky: Germans would conquer the territory they needed to be self-sufficient, and then create their own economy in isolation from that of the rest of the world. As Goebbels put it, “We want to build a wall, a protective wall.” Hitler maintained that the vicissitudes of globalization were not the result of economic forces but of a Jewish international conspiracy.
Hett, a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, sensitively describes a moral crisis that preceded a moral catastrophe. If Jews were held responsible for what happened in Germany, then Germans were victims and their actions always defensive. Political irresponsibility flowed from the unfortunate example of President Paul von Hindenburg. He was famous as the victor in a battle on the Eastern Front of World War I, even though the credit was not fully deserved. Hindenburg could not face the reality of defeat on the Western Front in 1918, and so spread the lie that the German Army had been “stabbed in the back” by Jews and Socialists. This moral weakness of one man radiated outward. Once Hindenburg won the presidential elections of 1925, Germany was trapped by his oversensitivity about a reputation that would not withstand scrutiny. He believed that only he could save Germany, but would not put himself forward to do so, for fear of damaging his image. Without Hindenburg’s founding fiction and odd posturing, it is unlikely that Hitler would have come to power.
As Hett capably shows, the Nazis were the great artists of victimhood fiction. Hitler, who had served with German Jews in the war, spread the idea that Jews had been the enemy within, proposing that the German Army would have won had some of them been gassed to death. Goebbels had Nazi storm troopers attack leftists precisely so that he could claim that the Nazis were victims of Communist violence. Hitler believed in telling lies so big that their very scale left some residue of credibility. The Nazi program foresaw that newspapers would serve the “general good” rather than reporting, and promised “legal warfare” against opponents who spread information they did not like. They opposed what they called “the system” by rejecting its basis in the factual world. Germans were not rational individuals with interests, the reasoning went, but members of a tribe that wanted to follow a leader (Führer).
Much of this was familiar from Italian Fascism, but Hitler’s attempt to imitate Mussolini’s March on Rome failed. When Hitler tried a coup d’état in 1923, he and the Nazis were easily defeated and he was sentenced to prison, where he wrote “Mein Kampf.” In Hett’s account, the electoral rise of the Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s had less to do with his particular ideas and more to do with an opening on the political spectrum. The Nazis filled a void between the Catholic electorate of the Center Party and a working class that voted Socialist or Communist. Their core constituents, Hett indicates, were Protestants from the countryside or small towns who felt themselves to be the victims of globalization.
Did the Nazis come to power through democratic elections? In Germany in the 1930s, as elsewhere, elections continued even as their meaning changed. The fact that the Nazis used violence to intimidate others meant that elections were not free in the normal sense. And the system was rigged in their favor by men in power who had no use for democracy or for democrats. The Nazis were by no means the handmaidens of German industry or the German military but, as Hett argues, both businessmen and officers formed lobbies in the late 1920s that aimed to break the republic and its bastion, the Social Democrats. They tended to confuse their particular interests in lower wages and higher military spending with those of the German nation as a whole. This made it easy to see the Social Democrats as foreign and hostile.
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