Is this how the German people felt right before Hiltler?

[zanana1]

They had to see the rise of antisemitism, intolerance toward gays, intellectuals, etc. I haven't read anything about Germans taking to the streets or of any writing condemning these things. How are we different, really?

[kentuck]

1. Right before Hitler?

Maybe right after Hitler?

[zanana1]

2. I'm sure it took awhile for the rise of anti semitism.

There had to be a buildup that Hitler took advantage of.

[Hav]

23. He could build on centuries of antisemitism

Not sure how to express it in a better way but I think it's not unreasonable to argue that the christian religion was a factor for that besides other cultural issues.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

3. The KEY to avoid it is the 1st Amendment.

Hitler and the Nazis made it ILLEGAL to criticize them by print or speech. That's when it got really bad. Some Germans were willing to report the "violations" of that law, like how Trump cultists would behave in that situation, and all it took was seeing some neighbors and family taken away by the Gestapo for breaking the law to make most people shut up.

[Mike 03]

4. There's a lot of interesting information on this.

It's been a while since I read the Richard Evans trilogy on the Third Reich. There was opposition to Hitler, before and as he began to seize power, but the cost of opposing Hitler was great. Also, there was "disbelief" among many (predominantly intellectuals) that Hitler could actually accomplish what he accomplished. It turns out you have to read the diaries kept by Germans in the 1930s to get a better sense of how people really felt about Hitler. Germany became a one party system. Imagine if every person in your town was a Tea Partier. You'd probably keep your head down. You might pretend to be one. You might join the Tea Party knowing you despise it just to survive. Some people did stand up and those who were not put in a work camp escaped Germany. (Many people fled Germany in the lead up to the war, but Hitler made it so you had to be very rich to do this, because he seized peoples assets. He told the Jews, in effect, get out but made it nearly impossible for them to do so. Many fled with nothing.)

There were so many crosscurrents in Germany in the early 30s stemming from the fallout of WWI and economic crisis, Because of this chaos, there was increased susceptibility to a populist dictator who said he wanted to restore Germany to its "former glory" and that there was a conspiracy to destroy Germany. I'm not sure how easy it was to see what exactly was happening as it was happening. It's probably a bit like the way Hemingway described going broke: "It happens gradually, and then suddenly."

I can't recommend highly enough The Coming of the Third Reich and The Third Reich in Power, both by Richard J. Evans. (There's a third book in the series about the war, but the part leading up to it is even more interesting).

One could devote a decade just to studying the ascent of the Nazis.

[OneGrassRoot]

7. Thank you. n/t

[bobbieinok]

12. Thanks for recommendation. I heard Evans give a talk on women in Germany in MN in the 80s

He's written great deal on history of women err n in Germany

He also wrote a study of the German Quarrel of the Historians (about how different German historians interpreted Germany's actions during WWII, IIRC)

He also wrote a report of the lawsuit David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstedt for calling him a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. That was a bizarre case, b/c she essentially had to prove the Holocsust did in fact take place. The trial was the cover story for one issue of the Atlantic

[zanana1]

22. Thank you so much.

I'm going to read one of those books.

[UpInArms]

5. The White Rose

White Rose

The White Rose (German: Weiße Rose) was a non-violent, intellectual resistance group in the Third Reich led by a group of students including Hans and Sophie Scholl. They attended the University of Munich. The group conducted an anonymous leaflet and graffiti campaign that called for active opposition to the Nazi regime. Their activities started in Munich on 27 June 1942, and ended with the arrest of the core group by the Gestapo on 18 February 1943.[1] They, as well as other members and supporters of the group who carried on distributing the pamphlets, faced show trials by the Nazi People's Court (Volksgerichtshof), and many of them were sentenced to death or imprisonment.

Hans, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst were executed by guillotine four days after their arrest, on February 22nd, 1943. During the trial, Sophie interrupted the judge multiple times. No defendants were given any opportunity to speak.

The group wrote, printed and initially distributed their pamphlets in the greater Munich region. Later on, secret carriers brought copies to other cities, mostly in the southern parts of Germany. In total, the White Rose authored six leaflets, which were multiplied and spread, in a total of about 15,000 copies. They denounced the Nazi regime's crimes and oppression, and called for resistance. In their second leaflet, they openly denounced the persecution and mass murder of the Jews.[2] By the time of their arrest, the members of the White Rose were just about to establish contacts with other German resistance groups like the Kreisau Circle or the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group of the Red Orchestra. Today, the White Rose is well known both within Germany and worldwide.

[dalton99a]

8. +1. There is a good movie:

[UpInArms]

10. Thank you

Will watch that ..

[burrowowl]

16. Kick

[zanana1]

24. True courage.

It occurs to me that most heroes are not found in textbooks. Tears.

[DFW]

6. Hardly

Germany after World War One was subjected to humiliating (for them) terms, and unpayable war reparations. They lost some of their territory, and forced to de-militarize part of what they kept. The people were easy pickings for a smart demagogue trying to make them feel like victims in need of someone to blame, and then some revenge. Even then, Hitler only became chancellor in 1933 with about a third of the vote. Ten years before that, he had been jailed after trying to start an uprising in München.

Trump is doing his stunt in reverse order. He already got into power, and wants to pull off a coup so he can stay there.

[texasfiddler]

14. Hitler was a smart demagogue

One of our saving graces is trump has the demagogue part down, but the smart part not so much. He is a one trick pony. I am frightened about a smart one in the future.

[UpInArms]

9. An excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free"

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

...

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

...

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

[FM123]

11. Thank you for that link.

One part that really stood out to me was: Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice—‘Resist the beginnings’ and ‘Consider the end.’ But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings.

[UpInArms]

13. ...

"But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

I feel this ‘graph is how our country has reacted to trump

[lark]

15. I talked to a woman who was 10 during WW2 and who was a young Nazi in school.

To go to school, the children had to be enrolled in the Nazi party, no enrollment, no school. They were taught it was their duty to spy on their parents and neighbors and report any who were helping Jews or who weren't loyal to the party. They were taught to hide in hedges and spy on them. If you didn't report anything, after a few months, you were publicly condemned in the middle of the classroom and punished.

Her dad was an Army officer who strongly disliked Hitler, but he didn't talk about it publicly, just a few of the other officers would discuss it in blackened secluded rooms. They followed his orders publicly, to protect their families, but privately they had a lot of angst.

That is what I think our military would do, just like them, they'd follow orders in the moment then stew about it privately afterwards, once the damage was done.

[musclecar6]

17. I agree

100% Trump is a would be modern day Hitler from the get go. The American people have just not figured it out enough yet. The worst part is the Republican congress have been hoodwinked and thrown in with this asshole. Hopefully we can vote him out in November otherwise things are gonna get much worse

[shockey80]

18. Watch the movie, 13 Minutes. It is the story of a german called Georg Elser.

He attempted to kill Hitler before WWII started. It is an amazing story. The movie shows how the German people were slowly divided. What happened if you spoke out against Hitler.

Elser was a carpenter, handyman. He built a sophisticated time bomb that missed killing Hitler by 13 minutes.

[Igel]

19. Not from what I read.

Feels earlier.

[DetlefK]

20. As a German, I can confidently say no. The circumstances Trump/Hitler are very, very different:

Germany after WWI was a mess.
* The economy was in shambles, it had to pay reparations and inflation was out-of-control.
* The and the politicians were useless. The parliamentary procedures of the Weimar Republic were rife with loopholes for abusing and sabotaging the democratic process.
* Both the Communists and the Fascists hated democracy and sabotaged it at every turn.

When Hitler rose to power, he did so in a beaten-down country with reviled politicians.

In the US on the other hand, Trump rose to power in a thriving economy with a beloved former President just out of office.



The people of Germany were willing to overlook Hitler's increasingly bold and radical political maneuvers because they had nobody to compare him to. (Chancellor Hindenburg was an octogenarian relic of the monarchic past and Chancellor Franz von Papen was a spineless suck-up to party-politics.)

In the US on the other hand, the people have the ability to compare Trump to Obama. Obama is the old normal, Trump is the new not-normal.

Apart from the artists and the ostracized (gays, jews, gypsies...) very few people in Germany actually realized in advance was Hitler was up to.

[UTUSN]

21. "how felt right before HITLER" - that was 2016. We are way far more along SHITLER now.