Chapter One: The Nazi Seizure of Power
Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany provide a proper place to launch a series on demagogues and dystopias. Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. He and his Nazi Party ruled Germany until his suicide on April 30, 1945. The intervening years witnessed some of the most dreadful events in the history of the world. An enormous and ever growing literature has sought to educate all of us about how this catastrophe came to pass. An important contribution to this literature is William Sheridan Allen’s, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1930–1935.1
Originally published in 1965, Allen’s book became widely assigned in German history classes in the succeeding years and has been labelled a “classic.”2 I was one of the students who read Allen’s classic. The year was 1967. It was my junior year at Yale. The course was “Germany from Bismarck to Hitler.” The instructor was Henry Ashby Turner, Jr.
Almost six decades have passed since then. This was truly a high impact book which stayed with me down to the details. And the book is detailed indeed. Allen takes us almost day by day through the events of 1930 to 1935. How could Nazism have taken this town over? In the national elections of 1928, the Nazis received a mere 2.8% of the vote. They had virtually no influence at that time in the town Allen studied.
That town, Northeim, had a population of about 10,000 in 1930 and is located in north-central Germany about 60 miles south of Hanover, the nearest big city. It had 120 German Jewish residents. Northeim was not a typical town. There is no such thing. But neither was it atypical. There were about a thousand towns in Germany this size, and almost a seventh of the population lived in one of them. Northeim was “the kind of town that English tourists were fond of discovering: provincial and off the beaten track, semimedieval, set in quiet and pleasant surroundings.”3 This sounds like a good description of the town today, although its population has climbed to about 30,000.
Beneath the pleasant façade, there were notable fissures in the town, “elements of strain and disintegration” which a demagogue could exploit “driving wedges into existing social gaps.”4 The most important of these were the social class lines, upper and upper middle on the one hand and lower and lower middle on the other.5 The working class which lived on the lower end of this continuum had its own social organizations. Most important, it had its own political party, the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), the Social Democratic Party. The Social Democrats inherited Germany after the defeat in World War I. The party was an amalgam of global, revolutionary Marxist rhetoric and far less dramatic, mundane day-to-day governance.
The subterranean cracks in Northeim society might never have erupted without a powerful external shock. That shock was provided by the great depression. In 1930, the depression was hardly a factor in Northeim, thanks to the fact that there were a lot of civil servants.6 However, as time passed, the effects of the depression came to be felt by all.
What mattered was not just the rise in unemployment. More important was the pervasive fear, the sense of dread especially among the lower middle class that their status was in jeopardy. “ . . . [U]nder the impact of steadily declining economic conditions, politics became radicalized.”7 This was the opening the Nazis needed and that they exploited vigorously and viciously. They appeared young and dedicated. And ruthless.
From a political point of view, what precisely did the Nazis offer? First, they were anti-Marxist. Second, the Nazi Party featured “fervent patriotism and militarism.” 8 Nazi propaganda was exceptionally effective. The first vote during the depression took place on September 14, 1930. Almost 94% of the voting population cast ballots, a remarkable turnout. The Nazis, who had attracted a mere 128 votes in Northeim in 1928, received 1,742 votes, 28%, of the total. “Over one quarter of the adult population now placed its hopes in Adolf Hitler.”9 As unemployment grew, fear grew with it. The Nazis held numerous meetings and rallies combining religion with nationalism, the latter in stark contrast to the international project of Marxism. Inside the velvet glove of the Nazis was a mailed fist. Political violence flared as 1931 dawned.10
The SPD was not quiet in the face of Nazi growth. The party held meetings and rallies of its own. As early as February 8, 1931, the SPD held a giant meeting at which the speaker declared, “Whoever wants to make a successful Putsch in Germany must also hold the power of the state in his hands. Therefore, Hitler wants to get into the government but never out.”11
Many Social Democrats “expected a Nazi takeover. They planned to fight, but” – and this observation is critical – “it was no longer fully clear what they were fighting for. For the Republic of General von Schleicher or von Papen? For democracy under rule by presidential emergency decree?”12 Despite all its considerable efforts, Allen tells us that the SPD “could not hope to win, for they lacked the brutality and irrationality of their opponents.”13
As the months passed, the appeal of the Nazis grew stronger. As Northeim became more politicized and tensions grew, so did violence. Allen notes, almost in passing, that in June of 1931, two Nazi Stormtroopers “trampled a socialist with their boots and cut off his fingers with a sickle.”14 Think about that. It feels even more brutal and terrifying than outright murder. The sadistic element in what was just a short while ago a peaceful town an English tourist would enjoy is starkly shocking.
The winter of 1931–1932 was miserable in Northeim. 1932 was to be the last social democratic year in both the town and in Germany as a whole. Noteworthy is Allen’s observation that “the middle classes were hardly touched by the depression in Northeim, except psychologically.”15 But the psychological element was quite overwhelming.
The Nazis were skilled at tailoring their appeal to the citizens of Northeim. They were relentless, and they had a local leader who was made to order for them. Ernst Girmann was in many ways a little Hitler “energetic, fanatical, cold, cynical, ruthless, and brutal.”16 Once he gained power, he would also prove to be corrupt. Girmann joined the Nazis very early – in 1922. His payoff came a decade later, when he became “local group leader.” As he put it bluntly, “I run things here – all by myself – and it’s because I’m local group leader.”17 This boast was not idle. The following year he became mayor of Northeim, pushing out his predecessor who was described as a “courtly” man who had been mayor for three decades.18 Girmann, who was anything but “courtly,” was the mayor until Northeim fell to the Americans early In April of 1945.
For all of Girmann’s faults, and there were a lot of them, it also should be said that he got results. By 1934 or 1935, the depression was over in Northeim. Public works projects sopped up unemployment. Funds from the central government and the army revitalized the town. Relief from the depression was at hand. Indeed, Allen likened the Nazis to Tammany Hall ward healers in New York City.19
What was the price of these results?
For Northeim’s 120 Jews, the price was existential. Two of them returned in 1945.20 We are not informed what happened to the town’s other Jews. In Northeim, according to Allen, Nazi antisemitism was regarded as “an unfortunate but temporary excess.”21 We are told – but only in a footnote – that when the local banker, a Jew named Hermann A. Müller, died in 1937 (of natural causes), “some sixty of Northeim’s leading businessmen attended his funeral.” A Nazi photographed “this scandal and the picture was published in Julius Streicher’s Stürmer over the caption “Judenknechte aus Northeim!” (“Jew-Serfs of Northeim!”).22
For the Social Democrats, the price was resignation to their defeat. Their leader, Carl Querfurt, advised his fellow Social Democrats to “Think of your family. There’s nothing to be gained by acts of heroism.”23 Indeed, a characteristic of Nazi totalitarianism was that it made heroism impossible.
For the bulk of Northeim’s inhabitants, the price was what Allen in his most effective chapter labels “the atomization of society.”24 There arose “the breakdown of interhuman trust under the impact of terror and rumor.”25 The Nazi Party was everything. “[I]ndependent social entities” of which there had been a thick network in Northeim died out or were terminated.26 Some of these just withered on the vine. What was the point of a social gathering if you had to be careful what you said? In these years, the “German glance “arose. This “consisted of looking over one’s shoulder before saying anything that might mean trouble if overheard.”27
Outwardly, Northeimers conformed to the “mature dictatorial system,” but their conformity was “empty of inner enthusiasm.” Northeimers, Allen believed, took to living “a life of compelled insincerity.”28 In other words, part of the price the Northeimers paid for Nazism was their willingness to live a lie.
The Nazis built a state that was all about war; and on September 1, 1939, the war came. By December of 1944 “the privilege of being part of the Third Reich had cost Northeimers 148 dead, 57 missing in action, and 14 captured sons, fathers, and brothers. . . .” On December 12, the town was bombed. Thirty more people lost their lives.29
Lost life, lost freedom, lost property. Perhaps worst of all, lost self-respect.
The Northeim story recalls the powerful declaration of Pastor Martin Niemöller:
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.30
The story of the Nazi seizure of power in Northeim is not a pretty one.
When I read this book so many years ago, I asked myself the kind of questions which one would expect a 21-year-old American college student to ask. What would I have done – how would I have acted – if I had been a citizen of Northeim during the years in question?
There is, however, one question which never so much as entered my mind. Could it happen in the United States during my lifetime? Upon rereading The Nazi Seizure of Power today, that is the question which asserts itself.
Could “it” – whatever precisely “it” is – happen here? There are a lot of powerful arguments that the answer is no. The differences between Germany in 1930 and the United States in 2024 are immense. Germany had become a united nation only in 1871. It suffered a defeat in 1918 which was experienced as a humiliation. The proclamation of the Weimar Republic was made to a sharply divided nation following that defeat. Democracy in Germany had shallow roots, beginning only out of the matrix of political turmoil following the First World War. German history stretched back thousands of years. Northeim itself received its city charter from the Guelph Dukes in 1252,31 centuries before there was any recorded history in what was to become the United States.
Germany had experienced cataclysmic inflation in 1923. French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr from 1923 to 1925, dealing yet another humiliating blow to a nation which had more than its fill of humiliation. Then came the depression, which struck Germany with special force and without which the rise of Hitler and the Nazis would have been unlikely if not impossible.
In the United States, democracy in some form predated the revolution. After 1776, there was a trend, however halting, toward broadening the franchise. The roots of democracy in the United States today are as deep as they were shallow in depression era Germany.
Despite these and innumerable other differences, the United States appears on the verge of forsaking democracy in 2024, just as Germany did in 1933. And for some of the same reasons.
Most important among these reasons is the cult of the demagogue. Once again, a caveat is called for. Trump is not Hitler. (Oddly enough, the man Trump has chosen as his vice-presidential running mate, Senator JD Vance, speculated during Trump’s 2016 run for the Presidency that he might be “America’s Hitler.” Vance says he has changed his mind.32) It is true that both Trump and Hitler inspire(d) a blind loyalty which it is impossible for those outside the cult fully to comprehend. Until the advent of Trump, a conviction for a felony would have ended an American political career. So would Trump’s conduct toward and comments about women. When asked about such things, a cult member observed that Jesus was also a felon. Not quite accurate, but accuracy is not a characteristic of a cult. Identifying Trump with Jesus is as common as it is incredible to outsiders. If anything, this may increase in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life on July 13, 2024.
To the best of my knowledge, Hitler himself was not likened to Jesus. The point is that the people displaying material such as this are unlikely to be persuaded to vote for someone else.
Another important similarity is the nature of the opposition to the demagogue. Note how socialists knew what they were fighting against but not what they were fighting for. General Kurt von Schleicher and Franz von Papen are mentioned. Two less charismatic political figures are difficult to imagine. They thought they could control Hitler. They couldn’t. Hitler had Schleicher murdered on June 30, 1934, the “Night of the Long Knives.” Papen escaped with his life, but not by much.
Donald Trump is the charismatic candidate in the United States today. Prior to July 21, he was running against a man whose cognitive decline has been apparent for well over a year. Joe Biden’s handlers persistently denied this obvious truth. Following his catastrophic “debate” with Trump on Thursday evening, June 27, denial was no longer possible. Biden delivered the worst public performance in the history of the American presidency. He is in failing cognitive health. An essential responsibility of any president is effective communication. That is clearly impossible for Biden now, and his decline cannot be reversed.
On July 21, Biden withdrew from the race. While he was in the race, Trump was effectively running against no one. But now, with Vice President Kamala Harris the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, all previous bets are off. Will she rise to the occasion? We will all find out together.
Recall the observation above in 1931 that once Hitler got into the government, he was not going to want to get out of it. The same may prove true of Trump if he becomes President in January. He has already said he wants to be dictator for a day. Of course that is not possible. There is reason believe that if we elect Trump, we may be electing a President for life.
Donald Trump has made it clear what his plans are for his second term. He is a demagogue who will produce a homegrown dystopia. We now know that “it” certainly can happen here.
The original publication information is: Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965. The book was republished with some additions in 1984. The new subtitle is: “The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945.” The publication information is: Brattleboro, VT, Echo Point Books & Media, 1984, 2014. The revised version has a new Preface and a new chapter: “Life in the Third Reich.” It is essentially the same book. The page numbers in the notes refer to the most recent edition.
Richard J. Evans, “Coercion and Control in Nazi Germany,” Raleigh Lecture on History, Proceedings of the British Academy, 151, 33 – 81, 2007, p. 68.
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“. . . Northeim looked upon itself as a city of civil servants: about one-third of its seven thousand adults were in the public employ, most working for the railroad. An additional fifth were widows and pensioners, so that close to half the townspeople has fixed incomes.” Page 12.
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This is the title of Chapter 14. Pages 217-232.
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There are numerous versions of this statement, for this one see: https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2019-01/First%20They%20Came%20by%20Martin%20Niem%C3%B6ller_0.pdf?l6HOtWW1N8umC_ELxnQI6NpaAYbxRCJj=
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Haley BeMiller, “Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance questioned whether Trump is like Hitler in 2016 messages,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 20, 2022, accessed July 16,2024; Savannah Kuchar, “In First Interview as VP Candidate, JD Vance Explains Why He called Trump, ‘America’s Hitler,’” USA Today, July 16, 2024, accessed July 16, 2024. Vance explained, ““I don’t hide from that. I was certainly skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016, but President Trump was a great president and he changed my mind.”
Beautifully written, riveting - and disturbing as well.