I don't know enough about the historical subject matter to have an opinion about the content, but in reading this, I'm starting to wonder if people on the internet have been taking the 'literally Hitler' bit more seriously than I realized.
You are wrong in IV. 2. when you say that someone claiming to support liberalism "can’t condone tactics that go outside of liberal norms." The magic words that let one do so are "Popper's paradox of tolerance." Then one is licensed to engage in "spiritual terror" ("vicious personal attacks" and "weaponization of social pressure" clearly describe "cancel mobs") and "physical terror" ("Punch a Nazi," anyone?).
This was brilliant. Thanks for the moral courage to flout Godwin's law. What's most striking is how few anti-Hitlerians dare to emulate his virtues, instead of merely condemning his vices....
# A Morally-Neutral Hitlerian Playbook
1. Be abundantly clear on your true goals
2. Recruit true believers
3. Ensure all actions align with those goals
4. Use your consistency to demonstrate the weakness of your opponents
5. First build a highly-structured alternate state before taking over the old one
6. Wait for the right crises (or create your own in a values-aligned way), then act boldly
7. Build a resource-generating flywheel from partial sympathizers
In terms of 'lessons learned', I think it's important to note that any would-be authoritarian dictators are now working in a post-Hitler world.
Society has done a really good job of becoming inoculated to the stimulus 'this person acts like Hitler'. When Hitler was rising to power, he was free to make all the spittle-flecked hate speeches he wanted, and it all seemed fresh and new and exciting. But if you tried that now, you would remind people of Hitler. Which would dampen your message somewhat.
I'm being kind of flippant, but I don't think you can just look at "the elements that let Hitler take over", and expect them to be replicated today by a would-be dictator. Any wannabe führers in 2023 have to work very hard to not seem like Hitler, so their methods and rhetoric are going to be completely different. Like, the closest equivalent we have to Hitler today is probably Putin, and he used a combination of 'being a faceless bureaucrat' with 'having lots of friends in the KGB' to become an evil overlord.
I just don't think you can generalise. Hitler was Hitler. The next fascist dictator will be something else.
At first I though this was going to be a review of my favorite board game and I was dissappointed.
Anyway looking at your list of the keys to making a powerful "nazi" type party the only group that can even remotely do that in the US is the university elites and I seriously doubt they ever would given that they hold a lot of the soft power in gov already. (They do have the requisite money, ability to bully, they don't have a psuedo second state, though ESG money is closeish????? They are open about illiberalism(affirmative aciton Ect), though the time of crisis we had (COVID) has passed. So I feel like a hitler esk figure is extremely unlikely in the current climate and so I won't worry about it.
I definitely think this review was a bit long winded, part 4 was a really good part, and part 3 had too much info about things that didn't matter for the review.
Well, why not list the oratory prowess? I'd maybe put that on point 1, rather than behind 5. A halfway-competent movement will eventually develop insights 1-5, but once-in-a-generation oratory prowess is what lets you actually generate the repeated attempts you need to learn your lessons.
This was good. I still find that I literally don't understand the words being used in these stories though. In the very early days of the DAP, what actually were these "meetings"? I've never been to a "meeting" in my life, so I just don't have a picture of what it was.
When Hitler went fundraising, how did he do it? Was it drunken old aristocratic lechers sitting in great drawing rooms, happy to have a nice young man listen to and agree with their tedious rants about how it was all the jews' fault, and then just writing him a cheque for a thousand deutschmarks?
And those four hour speeches - does anyone listen to a person speaking for four hours? Don't they need the toilet?
Perhaps these are all inconsequential gaps in my personal knowledge. But I still feel like this review has helped, but not quite answered the questions it set out to.
Great review. I think, from your account, Shirer underestimates the seriousness of the threat of Soviet Russia, and the extent to which it explains support of Hitler without having to reach for clichés about Germans being keen on being told what to do. Stalin would have killed millions of Germans if given half a chance, and at least some of the shock about the rise of Hitler stems from a Western-centric worldview - if France had been ruled by a genocidal lunatic, and then Germany had followed suit, there would have been much less of a feeling that this was an extraordinary event that required a vast amount of chin stroking.
Which also makes modern American (or indeed general developed world) concerns about dictatorship seem overblown. If the rise of a dictator requires a realistic threat from an insanely evil external enemy, we'll probably be fine until the robot apocalypse engulfs us all.
(And, as a thought experiment, if the robot apocalypse is surprisingly slow moving, wouldn't a lot of his most committed enemies vote for dictator Musk, even if he was running on a platform of "I am evil and I will destroy [ethnic group], but I am the only person with any chance of defeating the robots"?)
Does anyone else feel like Scott wrote this one, based off the opening section? I know the fan favorite right now is that he wrote the Njal's Saga one, judging by the Manifold prediction market*... but I can't help but feel that the opening section of this one sounds *so much like Scott*, this one should at least be in the runnings for "the one written by Scott".
Interesting look at how it happened. It does bring up all the alternate history speculations: did it have to be Hitler? By this, yes it did. So what would have happened if he had been killed during the First World War?
Or if the Axis Powers had won the First World War, would there have been a Hitler? Sure, he might have gone off and got tangled up in politics, but he might have remained a small time demagogue because Germany and Austria would still have had their monarchies and their empires, and the balance of power would have been different in Europe. Things would not have been the same when the Great Depression hit - there would have been no ready-made "I'll overturn the Treaty of Versailles extortion and Make Germany Great Again" platform.
I wondered how he could have been stopped and identified basically 2 big moments:
1. His 5 year sentence (which was supposed to be life) was reduced to 9 months. Maybe when officials pass laws like "treason gets you life" they do it to signal how tough they are, while still knowing that no one will actually serve life. Alternatively, it could be possible that the people in charge of the courts optimize for shorter sentences and don't mind flouting or stretching the rules. I'm of the unpopular opinion that if someone holds a ton of people up at gunpoint, they should be in prison for decades if not life, but I understand that not a lot of people agree with that, so I don't think that's a viable anti-Hitler path.
2. Forming a coalition to stop him from getting the votes. If you recognized that Hitler is a unique threat, you would have to briefly set aside your differences and secure a majority, then ban the Nazi party and jail him for the various crimes he committed, this time for life, or disappear him if possible. The 3 biggest complications with this plan is if a) the differences are too great to set aside, b) Hitler is not seen as a unique threat worth doing this for, and c) for some reason you are not able to exercise your power to stop him when you do form a coalition.
This episode comes across as an unstoppable force (Hitler) meets a very flimsy object. I view their inability to imprison him or execute him for treason to be downstream of their inability to form a coalition - everyone just had weakly held pro-liberal beliefs and viewed any attempt at upholding the law or building a majority coalition as Just Not Worth It. They simply didn't care about liberal democracy enough and when economic strife hit it was waiting to be overthrown.
Not bad, not a winner. Two nits to pick: A) Hitler as the "7th-member´" of the DAP - is Hitler's fabrication, (he was 55th, his number "555"; the DAP started the count at "501" to look less tiny). As are some other details. - B) The votes of the catholic "Zentrum" were needed , and there was a lot of pressure+promises - Hitler got the Vatican also to sign the first international agreement with the new regime ( wikipedia: "Reichskonkordat" ) - but their "Yes" was not that enigmatic: The then tiny democratic-liberal party agreed, too. (One of them became 1949 the first president of West-Germany, Theodor Heuss.) Though their votes were not needed. After all, there was SA with guns in the hall. Btw: See 2014 in the Crimean parliament voting for a "referendum". - I do agree with "do not call them Hitler", I disagree with "open about their illiberalism": Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Putin - all stick to their "we are flawless democrats, of course", as does LePen or AfD.
It seems a bit unfair to ding Shirer for "his prejudice against...the supposed gullibility and servility of the German people", given that the actual history involves a huge swath of the population--including much of its elite--openly voting for and supporting a man who, by the reviewer's own admission, was spectacularly open about wanting to become the nation's totalitarian dictator. Say what you like about Hitler's organizational savvy, rhetorical skills and political acumen--the public clearly knew what he was selling, and they were buying in droves. (*Why* they were so enthusiastic about autocracy is perhaps an interesting cultural/historical question to debate, but Shirer was clearly correct in observing that they were so--just as they were unquestionably in deep sympathy with Hitler's fanatical anti-Semitism.) Surely, then, "they have the support of (much of) the public, at least at first" belongs *somewhere* on the list of attributes of successful dictators, no?
For a lot of this I found myself irresistibly drawn to parallels with Alexander Hamilton, another brash young people-pleasing orator ("let's get this guy in front of a crowd!") who'd be key to a revolution. To the extent that I was imagining the Broadway-style songs, the staging of the scenes set in parliament and the one set in prison, the brief scenes showing the national populace's fears and feelings, and so on.
Are there any major films or stage shows depicting the rise of Hitler? I feel like it could be done in a quite compelling way without at all endorsing him: similar to Star Wars episodes 2-3.
I hurried up publishing my Substack on Hitler 1932-1933 when I saw this review. My take on Lessons is different. It's not "you need money to take over", but "you need guts, good strategists, and edgy but legal tricks to take over".
> What does it take to be literally Hitler? ... You remember Godwin’s law and the fact you live in a culture afflicted with Nazi apophenia.
What if this is just fundamentally the wrong question? What if pattern-matching onto a singular historical episode is a fixation based on psychological trauma rather than a good way to navigate away from bad outcomes?
A good question to ask about all such comparisons: how well would the early Lenin or Mao map onto the thing I'm worrying about? If the thing matches Lenin and Mao, but not Hitler, am I deriving false comfort from the fact that it's "not Hitler?" Because those guys did plenty of mass murder, too.
Conversely, if the thing matches surface-level characteristics of Hitler (e.g., "displays swastikas") but absolutely none of the characteristics of "actually gains state power," am I freaking out about the equivalent of a hippie burning an American flag, i.e., a deliberate but empty provocation?
As a side note, the current standard recommendation for an up-to-date academically rigorous political history of Nazi Germany is Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy: "The Coming of the Third Reich" (up through 1933), "The Third Reich in Power" (1933-1939), and "The Third Reich at War" (1939-1945)
I must say, based on this description, there is at least one current developed-world political figure who reminds me a lot of 1920s Hitler. Openly illiberal as well as viciously racist, a strategically brawling thug happy to use violence to enhance his political appeal, thriving on crisis, skilled at increasing his power through aggressive negotiation with more traditional rightists who half-agree with him and think they can use him.
That figure is Itamar ben Gvir. If this review causes one change in how this blog's readership does contemporary politics, I hope it is to strengthen their support of the present Israeli protest movement, and to give more credence to those who analogize Otzma Yehudit to the NSDAP.
"Germans who mistakenly thought the communists were the real threat ultimately played into Hitler’s hand. "
"Hitler seized total power to prevent a largely fictitious communist revolution. "
How do we know that the Germans weren't right, and that if Hitler didn't win, the communists would? How do we know that the communists wouldn't have been even worse for Germany? Germany already had a failed communist revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_October
"This isn’t to say that Hitler never lied. He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions, after all."
Hitler may not have had much in socialist intentions, but the party absolutely did. As the review mentions, Strasser took the socialist part of national socialism very seriously. So did Röhm, leader of the SA, who kept calling for a "second revolution" to redistribute wealth. It's partially for his socialism that Hitler got rid of him on the Night of the Long Knives.
Besides Hitler, who has led a coup/rebellion that failed to take over a country, then took power through an election (or post-election coalition)?
-Charles Taylor in Liberia*
-Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
-Prachanda in Nepal
Anyone else?
* "He took 75% of the vote from a war-weary electorate desperate for an end to the violence. One of Mr Taylor's campaign slogans ran: 'He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him.'" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/04/westafrica.qanda)
Very solid. Clear, straightforward prose that summarized the book, and then extracted and analyzed the part that interested the reviewer, in the process successfully navigating an enormous minefield. I felt like it provided a rough picture of certain aspects of Hitler's personality, and I don't know how accurate that is, but it helped me make sense of it all.
I do think the reviewer should have looked into the last 64 years of scholarship, though, just to give their readers a bit of a head start.
The content:
If shadow cabinets are so bad, why does the UK have them? Isn't having one just a sign of a centrally-organized political party (unlike the main 2 in the USA)?
Like others here, I think the overtly-anti-democratic thing has had its day, and now people are on the lookout for that. I think whoever comes next will have adapted. Either the cult of personality will be so strong as to overwhelm attachment to democracy, or there'll be an ideology that contains anti-democratic elements. Not that that's much different from Hitler, either way. So I suppose this is more a criticism of that segment of the reviewer's analysis - there's no clear lines, no simple categories, and it's all a matter of degrees. Any ideology which looks at half the country and says "it's OK if they vote but it's ethically wrong if they win" is a problem.
Regarding the use of terror, I don't see why the reviewer refers to BLM rather than to Antifa. BLM, IMO, is just a group who're trying to claim they can steer the elephant of popular anger, and are largely ineffectual except at providing cover for other more organized groups to pursue their own agendas. Antifa is organized (somehow) and may actually have goals. As for Jan 6, I'm tired of discussing it with people who haven't watched 6 hours of the Parler footage on ProPublica's site, so I shall not mention it again.
"When he tested again in 1908, his drawings were so bad he was excluded from consideration. Crushed, Hitler went to the rector of the academy for an explanation. He was told that his test drawings showed he lacked aptitude for painting, but he was encouraged to apply to the Academy’s School of Architecture."
As an artist, Hitler could draw buildings well, but not people.
I have read this book and its an excellent eye witness account of history. For me an even deeper understanding comes from The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh https://amzn.to/3YkwibV His early sections on the Nazi's rise and the way they established an authoritarian state are the best parts in my view.
Summarizing: if you think the problem with society is simply that the best people aren't in charge, you're at risk of becoming the next revolutionary. It seems Hitler's whole ideology, along with those of the communists, is all about a near-demented level of belief in some people just being way better than other people in all dimensions (intellectually, spiritually, morally...), and those people thus deserve to be in charge with democracy being a convoluted distraction.
Also: don't go on holiday in the middle of critical political moments.
> After one of his rants had come to the attention of some officers in the army, he was “posted to a Munich regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.”
I'm confused - they wanted to combat democracy, but viewed their role as serving a democratic republic?
For me, the interesting issue is The Great Man Theory of History--- In 1840 Thomas Carlyle said, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” But this view went out of style around the time of Darwin and Marx, replaced with a model of interconnected social relationships as the cause of social change.
But from the evolutionary sociology perspective, I wonder if peoples’ strong attraction to charismatic leaders comes from the times when it was adaptive behavior in intertribal conflict. It’s as if evolutionary mechanisms include ‘path dependency’ in the evolution of complex systems.
It’s hard to believe that today’s world wouldn’t be very different absent Muhammad.
>To achieve all this, Hitler concocted a piece of legislation known as the Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich.
I guess the phenomenon of crafting obviously BS nice-sounding names for monstrous laws is older than I thought. He should have just called it the Patriot Act and been done with it.
I appreciated the detailed exposition of the lead up to Hitler achieving his goal, which is the part of the book the reviewer chose to focus on. I have to admit that I have a rather selfish reason for that though; I have always meant to read that book and now I don’t feel nearly as compelled to. I enjoyed it.
As to the deeper issue, I thought it really brought into relief the “Swiss cheese problem” nature of these things. It gave me something to think about.
What I have read here is more or less "old and known" - thanks to public eduction in Germany.
The ideas that "Hitler was an incredibly talented speaker" and "the first German democracy was doomed anyway" have been used as a defense by former Nazis. They should be taken with a grain of salt.
What I find worth adding to the picture:
- Despite all instabilities, the Republic of Weimar also had 5 good years. The economy recovered, there was progress in art and science, Germany's post-WWI isolation ended in slow steps. Apart from the question "How could Hitler come to power?", I find it worthwhile asking "Why did the first German democracy fail?" and "Why did the second German democracy NOT fail, given that there were former Nazis and even SS member in key positions in justice and administration?"
- Ludendorff and Hindenburg were supreme army commanders (OHL) during WWI. They are responsible for a lot of the slaughter and the continuation of the war when it was clearly not going anywhere. Their stubbornness triggered uprisings in the army. Later on, to blame their failure on others, Hindenburg used a conspiracy theory ("Dolchstoßlegende") saying that the German army had been undefeated in open battle but backstabbed by socialists/Jews/you name it.
- Large parts of the elites were directly against democracy. Democracy was seen as "bowing to the enemy", "weakening Germany" or "being unpatriotic".
- As the loser of WWI, Germany depended on its former enemies which could either support or weaken political stability. France weakened it by occupying the Ruhr region in 1923. Foreign debt being called in weakened it again after 1929.
- While "the old system" had plenty of love, there was not a lot for democracy, and even its proponents had little experience in it and did big mistakes (bypassing parliament, letting people alone in times of hardship). That the constitution permitted letting a government fail without installing a new one (constructive vote of mistrust), did not help.
Two elements that look like antidemocratic / typical Nazi stuff but were done by others as well:
- Political murders happened in post-WWI Germany without the involvement of the Nazis, but often involving former army units. Even the new democratic government was involved in the murder of prominent communist figures Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919.
- Even the democratic powers had their own uniformed troops (Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold).
P.S.: Two elements that are obviously wrong but were a common pattern:
- Democracies turning into dictatorships or at least right-wing authoritarian regimes was the trend in 1930's Europe (somewhere earlier, see Italy).
- Antisemitism was a tradition in Germany and other parts of Europe.
So the question here is not "How do you spot the next Hitler?" but "How do you turn around a general phenomenon (not a singularity)?"
The reason Hitler was transparent about his illiberalism was that he was in the Weimar Republic, where democracy had few friends and the main alternative was Communism. In the US and other Western democracies, democracy is a religion, so being openly anti democratic would be a big mistake. Aspiring dictators in the West claim, instead, to be realising democracy more fully (see Trump, Hungary, Turkey, Israel under its current government, etc.) Specifically, their claim is that limits on their power make a mockery of democracy, giving control instead to a Deep State of shadowy elites. Incidentally, you can see that Hitler gave lip service to the sacred cows of his time. The public in the Weimar Republic was mostly socialist or even communist. So the Nazi party is not simply the German National Party, but the German National Socialist Worker's Party.
"His transparency on this point makes practical sense. The purpose of creating a mass movement, like Hitler did, is to get a segment of the population that’s actually on your side. If you build your coalition pretending to love liberalism and then unveil the plot twist that you’re totally against it, you’re going to damage your base of support."
A decent point, but there's an endrun around this, in that you can gradually redefine what the value you're trumpeting means, and count on group cohesion to make your followers justify it to themselves later. You can loudly trumpet how much you cherish "democracy" in some reverential quasi-religious way, treat voting like a sacred civic ritual, and then gradually redefine democracy to include your vision of a massive authoritarian bureaucracy that makes all decisions about every facet of a citizen's life and say it's still "democracy" because there's voting. All the maneuvering in American politics around the concepts of equity and equality are basically ways to get somebody to commit to a vague ideal with positive connotations, then redefine the ideal to mean something they wouldn't have signed onto originally, and hope the people who openly supported it feel compelled to ride along with the change or even feel compelled to defend each evolution of it.
If a country makes the same stupid mistake twice under two entirely different political regimes, we have to conclude that the problem with that country is that its people harbour an absurd belief regarding what might make them richer and more secure. Germany and Japan had won wars in the late Nineteenth Century which enabled them to go on the gold standard. But both were vulnerable to a 'capital strike' by the Britain and France and, a little later, the USA which were sitting on a mountain of cash. One cause of the First World War was the German belief that the French were trying to wreck their Stock Market as a response to Agadir. Another problem was that German economists (but also JM Keynes) believed that diminishing returns to global agriculture were setting in and that Germany was vulnerable to starvation unless it acquired land to its East. Thus the German people backed the Army's maximal program.
Why did Germany turn into a Dictatorship rather than have a military regime? A big part of the answer is the psychological impact of the collapse of Empires and the failure of Constitutional Monarchies (e.g. Spain). A Dictator-for-Life who could dismiss fractious Parliaments (more particularly if they were elected under Proportional Representation) was a good replacement for the Crowned Head.
What about totalitarian cadre based political parties? Why did they suddenly sprout up? One answer is mimetics. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had succeeded in defeating the Allies and the White Armies. Mussolini, in Italy, was seen as a slightly saner D'Annunzio and once he'd struck a deal with the Papacy, there was an obvious 'demonstration effect' for South Germany. Hitler, a Catholic by birth, wasn't anti-Catholic like the nutter Ludendorff. It must also be said that other right-wing German politicians were deeply flawed. General Schliecher didn't get on with Gen. Blomberg. The Strassers proved inept. Bruning seems to have been a fantasist. The SDs were a house divided and suffered most from the attacks of the Communists. Come to think of it, the Communist strategy succeeded in that they did get to be the boss of East Germany till Gorbachev tanked the Soviet Union.
Hitler seems to have had unusual powers as an orator and he certainly was ruthless in killing his own people. That's a good thing. The only thing worse than a murderous gangster is a murderous gangster who doesn't slaughter any of his own people who step out of line.
Whatever his political- or criminal- skill, the fact Hitler was brought into politics by the Army. First Ludendorff and then Schleicher and Blomberg helped his rise. Hitler carried out the General Staff's maximal program better than they could themselves have done. But it was a stupid program doomed to fail.
"He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions"
Common misunderstanding. The party was very socialist in the meaning of the word at that time: it wanted to organize society like one big company towards a common set of purposes (in this case national glory). Hayek's Road to Serfdom is a book aimed at criticizing socialism, and it mainly focuses on Hitler. Hayek later expressed frustration that the word changed meaning after he published it. Funny how much confusion this creates today when people see it in the Nazi title.
Nope, the chance to avoid 'boy cried hitler' has long passed. It is 100% rational to completely ignore any and all claims that so and so remotely right-wing political figure is a new Hitler because virtually 100% of the times that this has been said in the past have been acts of bold faced propaganda or hysterical nonsense.
Yawn.
Would have loved if the reflections and take-aways of part 4&5 were weaved into the stricktly 'book summary' part.
As hinted in the introduction, is there a good read on where and why Shirer's analysis clashes with the more contemporary consus among historians?
I don't know enough about the historical subject matter to have an opinion about the content, but in reading this, I'm starting to wonder if people on the internet have been taking the 'literally Hitler' bit more seriously than I realized.
Great synopsis. More if a synopsis than a review I think - although the lessons at the end were well thought out.
The only thing I found odd was this
“In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich in Germany, probably to avoid having to serve in the Austrian army alongside his Jewish and Slavic fellow-citizens.”
I don’t think anybody anticipated war in the next year by 1913.
You are wrong in IV. 2. when you say that someone claiming to support liberalism "can’t condone tactics that go outside of liberal norms." The magic words that let one do so are "Popper's paradox of tolerance." Then one is licensed to engage in "spiritual terror" ("vicious personal attacks" and "weaponization of social pressure" clearly describe "cancel mobs") and "physical terror" ("Punch a Nazi," anyone?).
This was brilliant. Thanks for the moral courage to flout Godwin's law. What's most striking is how few anti-Hitlerians dare to emulate his virtues, instead of merely condemning his vices....
# A Morally-Neutral Hitlerian Playbook
1. Be abundantly clear on your true goals
2. Recruit true believers
3. Ensure all actions align with those goals
4. Use your consistency to demonstrate the weakness of your opponents
5. First build a highly-structured alternate state before taking over the old one
6. Wait for the right crises (or create your own in a values-aligned way), then act boldly
7. Build a resource-generating flywheel from partial sympathizers
Having a collection of annecdotes on this is useful, but I'd really recommend [How Democracies Die](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38213092-how-democracies-die) as a general framework for this general topic.
In terms of 'lessons learned', I think it's important to note that any would-be authoritarian dictators are now working in a post-Hitler world.
Society has done a really good job of becoming inoculated to the stimulus 'this person acts like Hitler'. When Hitler was rising to power, he was free to make all the spittle-flecked hate speeches he wanted, and it all seemed fresh and new and exciting. But if you tried that now, you would remind people of Hitler. Which would dampen your message somewhat.
I'm being kind of flippant, but I don't think you can just look at "the elements that let Hitler take over", and expect them to be replicated today by a would-be dictator. Any wannabe führers in 2023 have to work very hard to not seem like Hitler, so their methods and rhetoric are going to be completely different. Like, the closest equivalent we have to Hitler today is probably Putin, and he used a combination of 'being a faceless bureaucrat' with 'having lots of friends in the KGB' to become an evil overlord.
I just don't think you can generalise. Hitler was Hitler. The next fascist dictator will be something else.
At first I though this was going to be a review of my favorite board game and I was dissappointed.
Anyway looking at your list of the keys to making a powerful "nazi" type party the only group that can even remotely do that in the US is the university elites and I seriously doubt they ever would given that they hold a lot of the soft power in gov already. (They do have the requisite money, ability to bully, they don't have a psuedo second state, though ESG money is closeish????? They are open about illiberalism(affirmative aciton Ect), though the time of crisis we had (COVID) has passed. So I feel like a hitler esk figure is extremely unlikely in the current climate and so I won't worry about it.
I definitely think this review was a bit long winded, part 4 was a really good part, and part 3 had too much info about things that didn't matter for the review.
Well, why not list the oratory prowess? I'd maybe put that on point 1, rather than behind 5. A halfway-competent movement will eventually develop insights 1-5, but once-in-a-generation oratory prowess is what lets you actually generate the repeated attempts you need to learn your lessons.
This was good. I still find that I literally don't understand the words being used in these stories though. In the very early days of the DAP, what actually were these "meetings"? I've never been to a "meeting" in my life, so I just don't have a picture of what it was.
When Hitler went fundraising, how did he do it? Was it drunken old aristocratic lechers sitting in great drawing rooms, happy to have a nice young man listen to and agree with their tedious rants about how it was all the jews' fault, and then just writing him a cheque for a thousand deutschmarks?
And those four hour speeches - does anyone listen to a person speaking for four hours? Don't they need the toilet?
Perhaps these are all inconsequential gaps in my personal knowledge. But I still feel like this review has helped, but not quite answered the questions it set out to.
Great review. I think, from your account, Shirer underestimates the seriousness of the threat of Soviet Russia, and the extent to which it explains support of Hitler without having to reach for clichés about Germans being keen on being told what to do. Stalin would have killed millions of Germans if given half a chance, and at least some of the shock about the rise of Hitler stems from a Western-centric worldview - if France had been ruled by a genocidal lunatic, and then Germany had followed suit, there would have been much less of a feeling that this was an extraordinary event that required a vast amount of chin stroking.
Which also makes modern American (or indeed general developed world) concerns about dictatorship seem overblown. If the rise of a dictator requires a realistic threat from an insanely evil external enemy, we'll probably be fine until the robot apocalypse engulfs us all.
(And, as a thought experiment, if the robot apocalypse is surprisingly slow moving, wouldn't a lot of his most committed enemies vote for dictator Musk, even if he was running on a platform of "I am evil and I will destroy [ethnic group], but I am the only person with any chance of defeating the robots"?)
A nice review, but I found the frequent mention of “Hilter” instead of “Hitler” distracting!
Does anyone else feel like Scott wrote this one, based off the opening section? I know the fan favorite right now is that he wrote the Njal's Saga one, judging by the Manifold prediction market*... but I can't help but feel that the opening section of this one sounds *so much like Scott*, this one should at least be in the runnings for "the one written by Scott".
*: As of the time of this writing, Manifold estimates an 84% chance he entered the book reviews (https://manifold.markets/warty/did-scott-alexander-enter-his-own-b) and an 80% chance he wrote the Njal's Saga review (https://manifold.markets/ShakedKoplewitz/did-scott-write-the-njals-saga-book) - implying a roughly 95% estimated chance that, if he entered, he entered with Njal's Saga.
Interesting look at how it happened. It does bring up all the alternate history speculations: did it have to be Hitler? By this, yes it did. So what would have happened if he had been killed during the First World War?
Or if the Axis Powers had won the First World War, would there have been a Hitler? Sure, he might have gone off and got tangled up in politics, but he might have remained a small time demagogue because Germany and Austria would still have had their monarchies and their empires, and the balance of power would have been different in Europe. Things would not have been the same when the Great Depression hit - there would have been no ready-made "I'll overturn the Treaty of Versailles extortion and Make Germany Great Again" platform.
It‘s been a long while since reading Shirer but this synopsis has left me as unimpressed as reading the whole tome some 30 years ago.
He (and countless others to be fair) are not able to answer the two basic question: Why Hitler? Why Germany?
Without answering them, one cannot try to get a feel for similar situations today.
I wondered how he could have been stopped and identified basically 2 big moments:
1. His 5 year sentence (which was supposed to be life) was reduced to 9 months. Maybe when officials pass laws like "treason gets you life" they do it to signal how tough they are, while still knowing that no one will actually serve life. Alternatively, it could be possible that the people in charge of the courts optimize for shorter sentences and don't mind flouting or stretching the rules. I'm of the unpopular opinion that if someone holds a ton of people up at gunpoint, they should be in prison for decades if not life, but I understand that not a lot of people agree with that, so I don't think that's a viable anti-Hitler path.
2. Forming a coalition to stop him from getting the votes. If you recognized that Hitler is a unique threat, you would have to briefly set aside your differences and secure a majority, then ban the Nazi party and jail him for the various crimes he committed, this time for life, or disappear him if possible. The 3 biggest complications with this plan is if a) the differences are too great to set aside, b) Hitler is not seen as a unique threat worth doing this for, and c) for some reason you are not able to exercise your power to stop him when you do form a coalition.
This episode comes across as an unstoppable force (Hitler) meets a very flimsy object. I view their inability to imprison him or execute him for treason to be downstream of their inability to form a coalition - everyone just had weakly held pro-liberal beliefs and viewed any attempt at upholding the law or building a majority coalition as Just Not Worth It. They simply didn't care about liberal democracy enough and when economic strife hit it was waiting to be overthrown.
Not bad, not a winner. Two nits to pick: A) Hitler as the "7th-member´" of the DAP - is Hitler's fabrication, (he was 55th, his number "555"; the DAP started the count at "501" to look less tiny). As are some other details. - B) The votes of the catholic "Zentrum" were needed , and there was a lot of pressure+promises - Hitler got the Vatican also to sign the first international agreement with the new regime ( wikipedia: "Reichskonkordat" ) - but their "Yes" was not that enigmatic: The then tiny democratic-liberal party agreed, too. (One of them became 1949 the first president of West-Germany, Theodor Heuss.) Though their votes were not needed. After all, there was SA with guns in the hall. Btw: See 2014 in the Crimean parliament voting for a "referendum". - I do agree with "do not call them Hitler", I disagree with "open about their illiberalism": Modi, Erdogan, Orban, Putin - all stick to their "we are flawless democrats, of course", as does LePen or AfD.
It seems a bit unfair to ding Shirer for "his prejudice against...the supposed gullibility and servility of the German people", given that the actual history involves a huge swath of the population--including much of its elite--openly voting for and supporting a man who, by the reviewer's own admission, was spectacularly open about wanting to become the nation's totalitarian dictator. Say what you like about Hitler's organizational savvy, rhetorical skills and political acumen--the public clearly knew what he was selling, and they were buying in droves. (*Why* they were so enthusiastic about autocracy is perhaps an interesting cultural/historical question to debate, but Shirer was clearly correct in observing that they were so--just as they were unquestionably in deep sympathy with Hitler's fanatical anti-Semitism.) Surely, then, "they have the support of (much of) the public, at least at first" belongs *somewhere* on the list of attributes of successful dictators, no?
Good reading. Thanks.
For a lot of this I found myself irresistibly drawn to parallels with Alexander Hamilton, another brash young people-pleasing orator ("let's get this guy in front of a crowd!") who'd be key to a revolution. To the extent that I was imagining the Broadway-style songs, the staging of the scenes set in parliament and the one set in prison, the brief scenes showing the national populace's fears and feelings, and so on.
Are there any major films or stage shows depicting the rise of Hitler? I feel like it could be done in a quite compelling way without at all endorsing him: similar to Star Wars episodes 2-3.
I hurried up publishing my Substack on Hitler 1932-1933 when I saw this review. My take on Lessons is different. It's not "you need money to take over", but "you need guts, good strategists, and edgy but legal tricks to take over".
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-reichstag-fire-and-january-6
> What does it take to be literally Hitler? ... You remember Godwin’s law and the fact you live in a culture afflicted with Nazi apophenia.
What if this is just fundamentally the wrong question? What if pattern-matching onto a singular historical episode is a fixation based on psychological trauma rather than a good way to navigate away from bad outcomes?
A good question to ask about all such comparisons: how well would the early Lenin or Mao map onto the thing I'm worrying about? If the thing matches Lenin and Mao, but not Hitler, am I deriving false comfort from the fact that it's "not Hitler?" Because those guys did plenty of mass murder, too.
Conversely, if the thing matches surface-level characteristics of Hitler (e.g., "displays swastikas") but absolutely none of the characteristics of "actually gains state power," am I freaking out about the equivalent of a hippie burning an American flag, i.e., a deliberate but empty provocation?
As a side note, the current standard recommendation for an up-to-date academically rigorous political history of Nazi Germany is Richard Evans's Third Reich trilogy: "The Coming of the Third Reich" (up through 1933), "The Third Reich in Power" (1933-1939), and "The Third Reich at War" (1939-1945)
I must say, based on this description, there is at least one current developed-world political figure who reminds me a lot of 1920s Hitler. Openly illiberal as well as viciously racist, a strategically brawling thug happy to use violence to enhance his political appeal, thriving on crisis, skilled at increasing his power through aggressive negotiation with more traditional rightists who half-agree with him and think they can use him.
That figure is Itamar ben Gvir. If this review causes one change in how this blog's readership does contemporary politics, I hope it is to strengthen their support of the present Israeli protest movement, and to give more credence to those who analogize Otzma Yehudit to the NSDAP.
"Germans who mistakenly thought the communists were the real threat ultimately played into Hitler’s hand. "
"Hitler seized total power to prevent a largely fictitious communist revolution. "
How do we know that the Germans weren't right, and that if Hitler didn't win, the communists would? How do we know that the communists wouldn't have been even worse for Germany? Germany already had a failed communist revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_October
"This isn’t to say that Hitler never lied. He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions, after all."
Hitler may not have had much in socialist intentions, but the party absolutely did. As the review mentions, Strasser took the socialist part of national socialism very seriously. So did Röhm, leader of the SA, who kept calling for a "second revolution" to redistribute wealth. It's partially for his socialism that Hitler got rid of him on the Night of the Long Knives.
Stellar. I'd love if you broke down the other three (five?) parts after the contest is over.
Besides Hitler, who has led a coup/rebellion that failed to take over a country, then took power through an election (or post-election coalition)?
-Charles Taylor in Liberia*
-Hugo Chavez in Venezuela
-Prachanda in Nepal
Anyone else?
* "He took 75% of the vote from a war-weary electorate desperate for an end to the violence. One of Mr Taylor's campaign slogans ran: 'He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him.'" (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/04/westafrica.qanda)
The review:
Very solid. Clear, straightforward prose that summarized the book, and then extracted and analyzed the part that interested the reviewer, in the process successfully navigating an enormous minefield. I felt like it provided a rough picture of certain aspects of Hitler's personality, and I don't know how accurate that is, but it helped me make sense of it all.
I do think the reviewer should have looked into the last 64 years of scholarship, though, just to give their readers a bit of a head start.
The content:
If shadow cabinets are so bad, why does the UK have them? Isn't having one just a sign of a centrally-organized political party (unlike the main 2 in the USA)?
Like others here, I think the overtly-anti-democratic thing has had its day, and now people are on the lookout for that. I think whoever comes next will have adapted. Either the cult of personality will be so strong as to overwhelm attachment to democracy, or there'll be an ideology that contains anti-democratic elements. Not that that's much different from Hitler, either way. So I suppose this is more a criticism of that segment of the reviewer's analysis - there's no clear lines, no simple categories, and it's all a matter of degrees. Any ideology which looks at half the country and says "it's OK if they vote but it's ethically wrong if they win" is a problem.
Regarding the use of terror, I don't see why the reviewer refers to BLM rather than to Antifa. BLM, IMO, is just a group who're trying to claim they can steer the elephant of popular anger, and are largely ineffectual except at providing cover for other more organized groups to pursue their own agendas. Antifa is organized (somehow) and may actually have goals. As for Jan 6, I'm tired of discussing it with people who haven't watched 6 hours of the Parler footage on ProPublica's site, so I shall not mention it again.
Brilliant review. Two points though:
1. Sound internal organisation is also a characteristic of good revolutions - vide the ANC in the anti-Apartheid struggle
2. "Spiritual terror" sounds a lot like the twitter mobs of today
Interesting insights
"When he tested again in 1908, his drawings were so bad he was excluded from consideration. Crushed, Hitler went to the rector of the academy for an explanation. He was told that his test drawings showed he lacked aptitude for painting, but he was encouraged to apply to the Academy’s School of Architecture."
As an artist, Hitler could draw buildings well, but not people.
I have read this book and its an excellent eye witness account of history. For me an even deeper understanding comes from The Third Reich: A New History by Michael Burleigh https://amzn.to/3YkwibV His early sections on the Nazi's rise and the way they established an authoritarian state are the best parts in my view.
Summarizing: if you think the problem with society is simply that the best people aren't in charge, you're at risk of becoming the next revolutionary. It seems Hitler's whole ideology, along with those of the communists, is all about a near-demented level of belief in some people just being way better than other people in all dimensions (intellectually, spiritually, morally...), and those people thus deserve to be in charge with democracy being a convoluted distraction.
Also: don't go on holiday in the middle of critical political moments.
Nicely told. Congratulations for taking on Godwin's Law and winning!
Based solely on the 5 points in section IV, which barely known modern political figures have a chance to take over a democracy like that?
>The terror has to be wielded strategically to advance the movement’s political aims
How did/would they do that?
> After one of his rants had come to the attention of some officers in the army, he was “posted to a Munich regiment as an educational officer, a Bildungsoffizier, whose main task was to combat dangerous ideas—pacifism, socialism, democracy; such was the Army’s conception of its role in the democratic Republic it had sworn to serve.”
I'm confused - they wanted to combat democracy, but viewed their role as serving a democratic republic?
For me, the interesting issue is The Great Man Theory of History--- In 1840 Thomas Carlyle said, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” But this view went out of style around the time of Darwin and Marx, replaced with a model of interconnected social relationships as the cause of social change.
But from the evolutionary sociology perspective, I wonder if peoples’ strong attraction to charismatic leaders comes from the times when it was adaptive behavior in intertribal conflict. It’s as if evolutionary mechanisms include ‘path dependency’ in the evolution of complex systems.
It’s hard to believe that today’s world wouldn’t be very different absent Muhammad.
>To achieve all this, Hitler concocted a piece of legislation known as the Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich.
I guess the phenomenon of crafting obviously BS nice-sounding names for monstrous laws is older than I thought. He should have just called it the Patriot Act and been done with it.
I appreciated the detailed exposition of the lead up to Hitler achieving his goal, which is the part of the book the reviewer chose to focus on. I have to admit that I have a rather selfish reason for that though; I have always meant to read that book and now I don’t feel nearly as compelled to. I enjoyed it.
As to the deeper issue, I thought it really brought into relief the “Swiss cheese problem” nature of these things. It gave me something to think about.
What I have read here is more or less "old and known" - thanks to public eduction in Germany.
The ideas that "Hitler was an incredibly talented speaker" and "the first German democracy was doomed anyway" have been used as a defense by former Nazis. They should be taken with a grain of salt.
What I find worth adding to the picture:
- Despite all instabilities, the Republic of Weimar also had 5 good years. The economy recovered, there was progress in art and science, Germany's post-WWI isolation ended in slow steps. Apart from the question "How could Hitler come to power?", I find it worthwhile asking "Why did the first German democracy fail?" and "Why did the second German democracy NOT fail, given that there were former Nazis and even SS member in key positions in justice and administration?"
- Ludendorff and Hindenburg were supreme army commanders (OHL) during WWI. They are responsible for a lot of the slaughter and the continuation of the war when it was clearly not going anywhere. Their stubbornness triggered uprisings in the army. Later on, to blame their failure on others, Hindenburg used a conspiracy theory ("Dolchstoßlegende") saying that the German army had been undefeated in open battle but backstabbed by socialists/Jews/you name it.
- Large parts of the elites were directly against democracy. Democracy was seen as "bowing to the enemy", "weakening Germany" or "being unpatriotic".
- As the loser of WWI, Germany depended on its former enemies which could either support or weaken political stability. France weakened it by occupying the Ruhr region in 1923. Foreign debt being called in weakened it again after 1929.
- While "the old system" had plenty of love, there was not a lot for democracy, and even its proponents had little experience in it and did big mistakes (bypassing parliament, letting people alone in times of hardship). That the constitution permitted letting a government fail without installing a new one (constructive vote of mistrust), did not help.
Two elements that look like antidemocratic / typical Nazi stuff but were done by others as well:
- Political murders happened in post-WWI Germany without the involvement of the Nazis, but often involving former army units. Even the new democratic government was involved in the murder of prominent communist figures Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919.
- Even the democratic powers had their own uniformed troops (Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold).
P.S.: Two elements that are obviously wrong but were a common pattern:
- Democracies turning into dictatorships or at least right-wing authoritarian regimes was the trend in 1930's Europe (somewhere earlier, see Italy).
- Antisemitism was a tradition in Germany and other parts of Europe.
So the question here is not "How do you spot the next Hitler?" but "How do you turn around a general phenomenon (not a singularity)?"
The reason Hitler was transparent about his illiberalism was that he was in the Weimar Republic, where democracy had few friends and the main alternative was Communism. In the US and other Western democracies, democracy is a religion, so being openly anti democratic would be a big mistake. Aspiring dictators in the West claim, instead, to be realising democracy more fully (see Trump, Hungary, Turkey, Israel under its current government, etc.) Specifically, their claim is that limits on their power make a mockery of democracy, giving control instead to a Deep State of shadowy elites. Incidentally, you can see that Hitler gave lip service to the sacred cows of his time. The public in the Weimar Republic was mostly socialist or even communist. So the Nazi party is not simply the German National Party, but the German National Socialist Worker's Party.
A bit pink, and lacking a summary of key points which would turn it into a good analysis, but a useful summary of events.
"His transparency on this point makes practical sense. The purpose of creating a mass movement, like Hitler did, is to get a segment of the population that’s actually on your side. If you build your coalition pretending to love liberalism and then unveil the plot twist that you’re totally against it, you’re going to damage your base of support."
A decent point, but there's an endrun around this, in that you can gradually redefine what the value you're trumpeting means, and count on group cohesion to make your followers justify it to themselves later. You can loudly trumpet how much you cherish "democracy" in some reverential quasi-religious way, treat voting like a sacred civic ritual, and then gradually redefine democracy to include your vision of a massive authoritarian bureaucracy that makes all decisions about every facet of a citizen's life and say it's still "democracy" because there's voting. All the maneuvering in American politics around the concepts of equity and equality are basically ways to get somebody to commit to a vague ideal with positive connotations, then redefine the ideal to mean something they wouldn't have signed onto originally, and hope the people who openly supported it feel compelled to ride along with the change or even feel compelled to defend each evolution of it.
If a country makes the same stupid mistake twice under two entirely different political regimes, we have to conclude that the problem with that country is that its people harbour an absurd belief regarding what might make them richer and more secure. Germany and Japan had won wars in the late Nineteenth Century which enabled them to go on the gold standard. But both were vulnerable to a 'capital strike' by the Britain and France and, a little later, the USA which were sitting on a mountain of cash. One cause of the First World War was the German belief that the French were trying to wreck their Stock Market as a response to Agadir. Another problem was that German economists (but also JM Keynes) believed that diminishing returns to global agriculture were setting in and that Germany was vulnerable to starvation unless it acquired land to its East. Thus the German people backed the Army's maximal program.
Why did Germany turn into a Dictatorship rather than have a military regime? A big part of the answer is the psychological impact of the collapse of Empires and the failure of Constitutional Monarchies (e.g. Spain). A Dictator-for-Life who could dismiss fractious Parliaments (more particularly if they were elected under Proportional Representation) was a good replacement for the Crowned Head.
What about totalitarian cadre based political parties? Why did they suddenly sprout up? One answer is mimetics. The Bolsheviks under Lenin had succeeded in defeating the Allies and the White Armies. Mussolini, in Italy, was seen as a slightly saner D'Annunzio and once he'd struck a deal with the Papacy, there was an obvious 'demonstration effect' for South Germany. Hitler, a Catholic by birth, wasn't anti-Catholic like the nutter Ludendorff. It must also be said that other right-wing German politicians were deeply flawed. General Schliecher didn't get on with Gen. Blomberg. The Strassers proved inept. Bruning seems to have been a fantasist. The SDs were a house divided and suffered most from the attacks of the Communists. Come to think of it, the Communist strategy succeeded in that they did get to be the boss of East Germany till Gorbachev tanked the Soviet Union.
Hitler seems to have had unusual powers as an orator and he certainly was ruthless in killing his own people. That's a good thing. The only thing worse than a murderous gangster is a murderous gangster who doesn't slaughter any of his own people who step out of line.
Whatever his political- or criminal- skill, the fact Hitler was brought into politics by the Army. First Ludendorff and then Schleicher and Blomberg helped his rise. Hitler carried out the General Staff's maximal program better than they could themselves have done. But it was a stupid program doomed to fail.
"He led a party with socialist branding and no socialist intentions"
Common misunderstanding. The party was very socialist in the meaning of the word at that time: it wanted to organize society like one big company towards a common set of purposes (in this case national glory). Hayek's Road to Serfdom is a book aimed at criticizing socialism, and it mainly focuses on Hitler. Hayek later expressed frustration that the word changed meaning after he published it. Funny how much confusion this creates today when people see it in the Nazi title.
Nope, the chance to avoid 'boy cried hitler' has long passed. It is 100% rational to completely ignore any and all claims that so and so remotely right-wing political figure is a new Hitler because virtually 100% of the times that this has been said in the past have been acts of bold faced propaganda or hysterical nonsense.