by James S. Corum, All News Pipeline:
Ever since Trump first ran for president, a central theme among Democrats and the media has been that Trump is literally Hitler, and his supporters — namely, Republicans — are literally Nazis. This has gone viral in the 2024 campaign featuring the New Republic’s infamous cover showing Trump as Hitler, published only a week before the first assassination attempt against Trump in July.
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As a historian who has done considerable writing and research into the history of the Third Reich, I think it’s time that someone who actually knows something about Hitler and Nazis to provide an assessment of these charges. I studied in Germany and for more than three decades I have spent many weeks in the German archives poring over documents of the Third Reich so I could write many books and academic articles on the Wehrmacht. The historians of the Bundeswehr’s History Office (authors of outstanding scholarship on the Third Reich) thought enough of my scholarship to commission me to author a chapter on Nazi war crimes in a book on 20th-century war crimes.
I will focus on the two months of February 1933 to late March 1933 during which the democratic Weimar system was destroyed and replaced by a one-party Nazi totalitarian state.
In January 1933, the German electorate was hopelessly split. Though the Nazis had taken a beating and had lost votes in the November 1932 election, it remained the largest political party in Germany, with 34% of the vote. Democracy-hating Nazis and Communists had just over half of the Reichstag delegates, making any coalition of democratic parties impossible.
On January 30, 1933, the senile and declining 85-year-old German President Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was convinced by his handlers to allow Hitler to become German chancellor and to lead a coalition government. Leaders of major democratic political parties accepted this, naively thinking that Hitler could be controlled. Many of those party leaders would die or suffer imprisonment for their bad judgement. Germany prided itself on following the rule of law, and most democratic politicians could not imagine that the Nazis would turn on them.
On February 4, 1933, Hitler coaxed President von Hindenburg into approving new national elections for March 5. Hindenburg also granted Hitler special emergency powers to use the police and censor the press to keep order. Hitler intended to use these powers to win the election and make the Nazis the majority by any means necessary.
Throwing Out Election Laws
The key to controlling Germany, a federation of 39 states, was control of Prussia. The State of Prussia constituted over 60% of the German landmass as well as 60% of the total German population. The Nazis demanded that the government of Prussia should also call for a state election, to be held concurrently with the national election.
Prussian law required the heads of both the chambers of the Prussian parliament, the Landtag, approve a new election. But the president of the upper chamber, Konrad Adenauer, the very popular mayor of Cologne and senior leader of the Center Party, refused to give his assent. This stymied the Nazi plans, so the Nazis simply declared that they could override the Prussian Constitution and called the election anyway.
Censorship
The emergency regulations allowed the Nazis to censor any media stories critical of them, and even to forcibly shut down opposition presses. At the same time, the Nazi press ramped up its own media campaign, hysterically describing moderate and democratic politicians like Adenauer as traitors and criminals while forbidding them from publishing any rebuttals.
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