When power translates itself into tyranny, it means that the principles on which that power depended, and which were its justification, are bankrupt. When this happens, and it is happening now, power can only be defended by thugs and mediocrities--and seas of blood.
James Baldwin, "To Be Baptized," No Name in the Street
The year is 1932 and the German citizens are already armed. Men, in uniforms, roam the streets. As Timothy W. Ryback argues in Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power, the 17th of July was a bloody Sunday. Some 20,000 brown storm troopers, "dressed in brown shirts" and wearing "swastika armbands", converged on Altona, a " bastion of Communist support".
There were serious injuries in the clash between the Communists and the National Socialists, but most important to Hitler was "the violence" that clash produced, violence that garnered the headlines "he hoped would gin up support for the 'victims' of democracy. "'Red Shoot at Nazis from Roofs in Altona'", (New York Times) which suited the would-be-dictator just fine.
Anything written about fascism has my interest. More, my concern. I studied the historical period in which US writers of literature during the early 20th century responded to the fight against fascism in Spain and Germany. Many blacks volunteered to fight in Ethiopia against the Italian fascists.
Ryback's focus on the year, 1932, documents, to echo Adam Gopnik, how a "democratic machinery handed absolute power over to someone who could never claim a majority in an actual election and whom the entire conservative political class regarded as a chaotic clown with a violent following". ("The Forgotten History of Hitler's Establishment Enablers".)
How history rhymes.
Or is it studied more by the would-be-dictators, fascists, than by those seeking a democratic society.
And this democratic government, the Weimar Republic, wasn't in decline, writes Gopnik. Germany during the mid-twenties experienced its "golden" years. As Gopnik writes, it seemed as if the "irrational" forces "were more logical"! And yes, Paul von Hindenburg and Franz von Papen were "never Hitler men", and both "entreated Hitler to recognize his own unsuitability for the role" of Chancellor.
Nonetheless, Hitler saw himself as a dictator. Already!
As the French writer Jean Gu e' henno writes in his diary during the German occupation in France, Hitler, in Mein Kampf, declared himself a man working "for peace". He was "distracted" from that peace work by the Weimar Republic!
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As these confrontations increased, the killings escalated, Ryback writes, "unabated" into August. Newspapers wrote of the casualties, from the country's "ongoing Burgerkrieg, or the civil war." Joseph Goebbels, writing in his diary, talks of the "crazy things" that are going on with "guns and things like that". The Vorwärts ' headline pointed to Hitler's desire to rule! He wants to rule! While others pointed to Hitler's lack of political qualifications.
There was also the business of a prison time served. For treason! But there's his hate for the Weimar Republic, for democracy, for difference--racial or gender. For Hitler, the political opposition must be "eliminated". He wasn't a "tyrant"; however, he claimed he was simply "fighting for the honor of the German people". Because, after all, only he, and he alone, could save German people from democracy, an ideology that made victims of people like him and his followers! His believers.
Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis Party's chief ideologue, looked at the US and its Constitution. While the Constitution guaranteed "'formal equality between whites and blacks", southern whites had developed a remedy: lynching. Lynching was one way "to keep America's black population in place". Germany, in turn, could affect "lethal rebalancing", a term to call the disenfranchisement and killing of Slavs and Jews.
Journalist Dorothy Thompson called Hitler, the "little man". But this little man could count on 400,000 storm troopers (Ernst Röhm's little army) fighting against the Red Front's Fighters' League and the "militarized wing of the Social Democratic Party". By joining Hitler's storm troopers, so many "young Germans", writes Ryback, had the "chance to escape from reality". And so his armed men grew in numbers. By December, Hitler had 107 delegates in the Reichstag. Hitler's National Socialists were the second-largest party.
Along with Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Röhm--all wanted to "liberate" the "German people from the democratic structures and process and the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles". Backroom "bargaining" is fine, but a "violent revolution" is just as good. Hitler understood that to change the culture, the Nazis needed to change the political system. It was a political system he hated, and he looked to Goebbels (Mr. Propaganda) to make the destruction of democracy a collaboration with citizens, writes Ryback.
I recently came across an article in Common Dreams, in which the left-wing Progressive International (PI) announced it had an "extensive" new data base connecting the dots on what the group calls the Reactionary International (RI), "a loose global network of right-wing leaders and organizations working to subvert democratic institutions". We know the names: Orban of Hungary, Modi of India, Evangelical Christian nationalists in the US who are actively influencing African countries, alone with as tech companies "empowering ubiquitous state surveillance", pretty much everywhere they can get away with setting up shop. And then there's Trump. Trump.
The RI is a "who's-who of the world's right-wing forces". It's comprised of think tanks, foundations, politicians, judges, financiers, and others whose work is to create a global network, in which to "corrode our democracies, destroy our planet, and drive us clear to world war".
PI's goal, on the other hand, is to "support democratic systems to become more resilient" to these "insidious tactics".
Here we are in the US, months away from the November Presidential election.
In 1928, the National Socialist had 12 delegates. The Social Democrats had 153 seats, the National People's Part, 73 delegates, and the Communists, 54. By September 21, 1930 elections, the National Socialists became "the second-largest political faction" in the Reichstag, writes Ryback, "behind the Social Democrats". But on election day, in July 1932, Hitler "commanded the largest political party in the Reichstag, which afforded the National Socialists claim to the Reichstag presidency".
It was a long but determined effort on the part of Hitler and his henchmen. By 1932, Ryback writes that Hitler had been "engaged in German politics for thirteen years, given hundreds of speeches, appeared before millions of people, and yet had never entered an election"--until that year.
On election day on November 7, 1932, Hitler lost votes. "'CRUSHING DEFEAT FOR HITLER!'" This was the Vorwärts' headline. "Two-thirds of the German people had rejected Hitler." It was the violence! The violence was too much for some. "Germans did not want a Hitler dictatorship." They didn't want to see what Otto Dietrich called for: "an armed insurrection", an "overthrow of the government", and Hitler installed as a dictator. The old man, Hindenburg, "over eighty", was still in charge, but some noted that Hitler "spoke as if he had won the election".
Not perturbed in the least, Hitler's henchmen forged ahead, continuing Hitler's work, that is, the work of legalizing "high treason".
Despite another loss for the National Socialists, the "jobless" joined the ranks of the SA. It "meant getting a small salary"!
Determined to be a dictator, Hitler, nonetheless, considered his financial woes a time to appeal to the troops. That is, would-be-voters. He called on the public to send money. Hitler insisted that "'even the smallest amount will help'". He wasn't above calling on the wealth, such as the steel magnate Fritz Thyssen and Berlin's piano manufacturer, Edwin Bechstein.
As for the Lufthansa plane... the plane Hitler bought some years before? Well, Ryback writes, its lease expired! His handpicked pilot, Hans Bauer, informed him that it would cost some 275 reichmarks (about 1.5 million today).
Okay. He could wait, Hitler told Bauer. "Before long I will be chancellor and then I'll establish an official air service and put you [Bauer] in charge of it."
