Some really looks at the rise of the Nazis in an electoral sense:
I think that’s a platitude that simply isn’t true. Because in 1930 Hitler wasn’t the original, he was a washed-out copy of what was offered by the DVP or the DNVP. The DNVP ran a more antisemitic campaign than Hitler, and yet it was the biggest loser of the election, shedding 7.3% of the vote.
Worth reading in full.
Any discussion and analysis of that period that doesn’t mention that the middle classes were shit scared of the communists taking what little they had and that the SPD had set the precedent of using the enabling act is incomplete. Although I accept it may be discussed in his book.
As for Merkel, I think he’s looking back through rose-tinted spectacles. A lot of Germany’s current problems can be laid at her door and not just immigration. There was a distinct lack of capital investment during her time and it’s now caught up with them. When my German teacher goes home to visit family he won’t travel on the trains because he doesn’t trust the bridges, for example.
If Merkel had been paid by Putin to weaken Germany and strengthen Russia what would she have done differently?
Doesn’t trust the bridges? Crikey.
I have a bit of a theory that reunification of Germany has been a disaster for West Germany. The explanation for the success of West Germany after the war is things like the Marshall Plan, denazification, but in reality, that was the industrial bit of Germany before the war. The bit that traded, made cars and chemicals. You cast off the equivalent of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and you get quite a lot richer. You also get more of a pro-capitalist mindset.
They brought back millions of people who were not only not that industrial before the war, but had 40 years of statist culture. You prospered by being a diligent Young Pioneer, following the party rules, however stupid and unproductive. They’ve been shovelling money Eastwards ever since.
Reunification resulted in deferred payment. In the 90s the Germans thought that they had this problem cracked, but the bills have been mounting.
Investment in the East had made many towns nice, but a lot of the Soviet infrastructure is still there and the new factories did not bring the promised jobs.
We are burdening ourselves with a global welfare bill that makes reunification costs into a rounding error. That on top of the other strategic errors of the Merkel era.
What a lot of old bollox.
Doing a quick search on this chap, it is clear that the liberal media in Das Reich are lapping this up.
As BiND says, the German middle classes were the real victims of the Depression and saw the likelihood that the KPD might gain some kind of foothold in power. The SPD and KPD hated each other. Stalin had labelled the SPD as Social Fascists and the KPD went full out to undermine them.
The 1931 banking crisis in Germany was caused by the collapse of the Austrian CreditAnstalt in May, which was brought down by its exposure to German debt ( a bit circular there ), dodgy investments in Eastern Europe and a mysterious shortfall in its deposits. The German economy was already in serious decline after 1929 and this caused it to freefall.
We must remember that the Great Depression was not the sudden event that people think. It took a while to wind up across the world. Britain had been in a parlous state since 1921 and had a lower base to fall from, so in fact the Depression was shorter and in fact emerged much stronger.
So in other words, the people who voted NSDAP were the ones who were suffering the most and still had most to lose. They had lost confidence in the established parties and feared the growing left.
Merkel is now being seen as the architect of Germany’s current decline. Merz is not despised because he is a right winger, but because he is useless. He is the German Starmer or even Sunak.
So in other words, the people who voted NSDAP were the ones who were suffering the most and still had most to lose. They had lost confidence in the established parties and feared the growing left.
That is the lesson they should have been drawing and analysing why they’ve failed/are failing in most of Europe.
Merkel is now being seen as the architect of Germany’s current decline. Merz is not despised because he is a right winger, but because he is useless. He is the German Starmer or even Sunak.
I think he’s despised because he’s not being right-wing despite his promises. His commitment to the firewall has meant that he’s had to track to the far left of his own party and go in to coalition with the SPD who’d been severely punished along with their coalition partners in the last government. (Between them they lost 190 seats, with the SPD losing nearly 50% of theirs).
He even had to make Klingbeil finance minster FFS. That means a continuation of leftists’ economic policies which are currently only marginally better than the useless Habeck’s.
Merz is another ‘ conservative’ who’s really a centre-left politician.
It is worth pointing out that under Reform policies Hitler would have been deported as he was a violent immigrant.
I see one of the great deceptions of the 21st century being maintained in the article. “I’m studying how the rise of Hitler explains the right wing extremism of today”. Cunning little bugger, our Adolf. Standing .up there screaming to his adoring followers “I am proud to be a National Socialist!” to disguise the fact that he was far right. I’m not saying the name of a political party can’t be a deception-look at the LibDems (illiberal and undemocratic) and the Conservative (LabourLite)-but the fact that the facists weren’t socialists looks way too convenient for the facist UK governments since 1997…
Rather than the ‘left-wing v right-wing’ argument, I’d always ask how much of your life does a government want to control. How much meddling in the economy does the government want to do? Hitler was ‘big state’. The government dictated how people lived. Sure, he let people run businesses but as Hugo Junkers found out, if your business didn’t do what the government wanted, you might find yourself falling down your stairs at home a couple of dozen times.
It’s the exact opposite of classic liberalism which wants a government to do the bare minimum.
I don’t like “left wing” and “right wing” because no-one can agree on a definition. More economically liberal? More nationalist? More religious?
And yes, statism is the thing. Not even communism. Private business is meaningless if it is micromanaged by the state. Rail privatisation was bullshit because the TOCs got to decide almost nothing. They can’t buy trains from who they want, can’t shift to dynamic fares, skip stations or cancel routes. Which is why it barely improved trains, and why nationalisation is making sod all difference. Real privatisation would have operators bidding for slots and buying trains, hiring staff, doing their own ticketing etc.
National Express was just sold off to management, lock stock and barrel. Get on with it. And it constantly improves. They were there with wifi and e-ticketing before trains. There are no ticket offices. They do dynamic pricing, which trains still aren’t. They’re more punctual, reliable and cheaper. It’s a growing market.
And yes, statism is the thing.
This is why Left and Right can’t even agree on terms. Statism is “the thing” to those who hang out chez Timmy, but not to everybody.
The Left cares about ownership. To them the Right want private ownership, fascists wanted private ownership, ergo the Right are fascists.
I consider myself on the Right. To my mind this is about freedom from the tyranny of the state. The fascists wanted control, the Left want control, ergo the Left are fascists.
“ownership” means you can do what you want with it.
The Nazis wanted something rather different; they wanted you to “own” something as long as they dictated everything you could do with it.
I call that “someone to blame” instead of “owner”, but I guess that’s just me.
Although national express run on assets run by the Government.
Just as the trains could as well, if they sold slots in the way they do for airlines.
Sure, government is still involved, nothing’s perfect, but it could be a lot better than it is.
This is precisely the correct distinction IMO. I’ve even made some headway with mates by pointing out that every single fucking thing the British government touches bar the army at say major and below and similar in the other forces is utterly fucked, and asking them why they want it to do more, not less.
Two legends (Otto and the BiND) point out the Herd of Elephants in the room that was the KPD – fear of whom undoubtedly contributed to the middle class turning to the Nazis for protection. In addition, we already have a low level version of Bosnia Herzegovina with nearly as many ISIS followers ready to go in Germany as there are in the UK – five figures bordering on 6.
Bollards around Christmas Markets and Christian places of worship? Tick.
Concerns in the mainstream about ‘Islamophobia’? Tick.
An establishment who sees he indigenous population as more problematic than invading headhackers? Tick.
I agree Tim its worth reading in full but the author’s WEF/ pro EU credentials shine through – oppression and restriction on freedom are absolutely fine if its him and people like him undertaking them!!
“the situation we now have with Germany’s Christian Democrats: a party that under Merkel was absolutely centrist and managed to retain loyal voters but then picked a figure from its right wing as their new leader in Friedrich Merz. And voters are switching to the AfD. The central lesson to me is that conservative parties can only win from the centre.”
I think we can safely ignore any analysis from someone who thinks Merz is ‘right wing’.
One of the problems with Nazi Germany is how much of it is perceived through what footage people have: Hitler speeches, Reni Liefenstahl propaganda films, old newsreel footage and the film Cabaret.
If you see a prosperous modern city, cars being made, and gay clubs, you can’t make any sense of the Nazis, other than Hitler somehow brainwashed people. The problem is that isn’t representative of how Germany was. The gay clubs were one tiny bit of Berlin. The cities in the west were quite modern and prosperous but the east was agricultural peasants without much mechanisation. That never really got filmed. If you throw in fears about communists and Russia, large numbers of Jews coming from the East in the 1920s, you can see why the big support for Hitler came from that area and Bavaria.
Eastern Germany 1930 is a different planet that takes a bit of imagination. Not much mechanisation, so, food is short. Those rugby players that got trapped in the Andes ate human flesh because they had to. Vegans would soon find themselves catching fish if they were stuck on an island off Alaska. If you’re already struggling to feed your family, you are much more desperate than someone that isn’t. You can’t draw any sort of parallels of the “far right” in Europe today because of combine harvesters, good roads, inorganic fertilisers.
It’s something most people don’t grasp about The Final Solution. Yes, hatred of the Jews. But the Nuremberg Laws weren’t about killing Jews. They were about making Germany so shit for Jews that they’d leave. Which was quite successful. 50% of Jews packed their bags and left Germany. The Final Solution was prompted by food shortages. Bad harvests, problems because of the war. Now, how do you solve a food shortage problem? Either, a load of people naturally starve to death, or you kill a certain group of them. It’s why they didn’t just immediately murder all the Jews. The ones that could work were kept alive, enslaved.
A parallel you can draw is that the current establishment, not even the parties clamouring to become the establishment, want to ban combine harvesters, good roads, and inorganic fertilisers. Or make them much more expensive and highly regulated, which amounts to the same thing.
The sort of wankers that want this all exist on the back of modern society. The green revolution made food a lot cheaper, made people richer. And apart from warmer homes and more consumer goods, you could have more government. More money being burned on recycling consultants and diversity officers without anyone noticing too much.
If you went back to food costing organic prices for all, bang goes a lot of the excess. People will want their consumer goods, but after that, they’ll not be so much left. Government will be limited to fixing street lamps and nicking villains.
It’s like hippy vegans. You can’t be a vegan without shipping food from other countries. You can hold the view of “we should not boil gaia” and “I don’t want to eat Daisy the Cow”, but you can’t hold both. No imports of rice, nuts, beans and soya, you’re going to be eating more bacon and eggs.
Nope, Bavaria didn’t vote for Hitler. They had their Bavarian People’s Party, that ran the State until the Nazi takeover and tried to keep Bavaria as independent as possible – a “centre of order within the Marxist chaos of the Weimar Republic”.
See the electoral map here; the Catholics had their own conservative, middle-class parties and they pretty much held their vote despite the rise of the Nazis. Unfortunately although they dominated politics in their States, there weren’t enough of them nationally to make a difference at the federal level.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/dnvjej/nazi_party_votes_vs_catholic_population_germany/#lightbox
Don’t forget it was the Bavarian government, run by the Bavarian People’s Party, that put down the Beer Hall Putsch and jailed Hitler and his pals (although that did unfortunately give him time to write that dreadful book).
As an interesting aside, the only Bavarian Minister who wasn’t captured in the Putsch, the Vice-President, was away having dinner with Pacelli (later Pius XII), and organised the resistance from the Archbishop’s Palace.
I stand corrected. I thought I saw a map with Bavaria showing it but I’ll trust yours.
“The problem is that isn’t representative of how Germany was. The gay clubs were one tiny bit of Berlin. The cities in the west were quite modern and prosperous but the east was agricultural peasants without much mechanisation.”
Said like that it’s probably valid today as well
Herr Oltermann doesn’t know what fascism means. In Commie speak, ‘fascism’ means bad. Nothing more, nothing less.
He labels his opposition to create a strawman, then attacks it. With zero intellect.
Worth remembering that the purpose for which this was written is to discredit AfD
I didn’t think of that. So he creates a strawman for AfD, and attacks it.
Hitler did not win on an antisemitic ticket, that is true, because basically everyone was antisemitic. Even so, no one went to the voters with a holocaust plan – today everyone forgets the holocaust didn’t really get going in full swing until 1942, in a way a consequence of having no less distasteful option.
The real problems, as always, stem less from the obnoxious political positions (about as obnoxious as those of most competing parties) than from the fact that 1933 was the last election. Elections were abolished, competing parties were quickly banned or co-opted, and the dictatorship was safe within a year. Any party in charge under those circumstances would either have “pulled a Hitler” or “pulled a Stalin”. Anyone doing that with another election looming wouldn’t have survived the election.
The Nazi electoral success of the early 1930s was therefore far more a response to bolshevism, which was making itself heard, loud and clear, on the streets of Germany in the 1930s. But the bolsheviks could equally have won, and done something similar, the outcome may have not been that different, not even for the Jews of central Europe.
Anyone wishing to draw a parallel to today, in terms of reactionary political movements, may wish to observe which ideologies are making themselves heard, loud and clear, on the streets of Germany.
“The Nazi electoral success of the early 1930s was therefore far more a response to bolshevism, which was making itself heard, loud and clear, on the streets of Germany in the 1930s. But the bolsheviks could equally have won, and done something similar, the outcome may have not been that different, not even for the Jews of central Europe.”
Every government has to (at least to some extent) care about the people. Or the people might rise up. Yes, dictators will attach car batteries to people’s goolies, but that’s only a few of the people. The ones trying to overturn the dictator.
Actually, you have me wondering if the Nazis weren’t in, if not a class of their own, quite a small class for attaching car batteries to peoples’ goolies for reasons other than being a threat to the continuation of the current order.
“current order”.
Nice one.
Sounds like a classic Labour voter (or, these days, minister).
You don’t have to be a tax-dodger or fraudster to work here, but it helps!
Interestingly you could use the ‘Dolchstoss’ theory for contemporary Britain – my only real technical objection is that to call Starmer, Burn ’em and the entire degenerate crew ‘The November criminals’ imply that they are fine the rest of the year. They are the ‘forever criminals’ and that needs to be borne in mind.
How much of the sleeping in was because he was boring people to tears until 3am with his Table Talk?
It’s even funnier….
He’s depicting Hitler as an artsy layabout with Political Dreams, a Manifesto, and Grudge, who hangs around in cafés and artsy places discussing his Grand Revolutionary Plans which will Fix the World with his mates..
Which sounds pretty much like….
As BiND and Otto say above, thirteen years earlier the next door country but one to Germany had seen its entire ruling elite murdered and many of its middle classes dispossessed (if not murdered or gulaged).
Back then people had longer memories and more straightforward attitudes that they do now, because the Commies hadn’t at that point wrecked the German education system.
(Nowadays most people don’t know what happened thirteen weeks ago, and if they do they have no framework for analysing it.)
The Commies, of course, learned from this.
They play the long game.
The only people who play a longer game are their new best friends the islamists.
Ho ho ho.
These days he’d be given an op-ed in The Guardian and Matrix Chambers would be defending him at our expense.
Not a single mention of the Civil War in Germany in 1918 -19 between Communists and Nationalists, which the Nationalists won, or the continuing Communist violence up until 1933. Germans voted for the NSDAP because they were the only party to actually fight back against that left-wing violence. Talk about a partial history!
It was out of the Friecorps NSDAP was born
So your saying “Blame Ernst Röhm and Hermann Ehrhardt?”
You wouldn’t be the first to say that…
Night of the Long Knives was Hitler’s way of dealing with LGBTQ+ in his organisation.
HR would never allow it today.
That explains the fancy uniforms.
German joke c.1940:
Göring, Goebbels and Himmler were walking down Unter den Linden, but nobody recognised them, why?
Göring was out of uniform, Goebbels had his mouth shut and Himmler was with a woman.
Nor right wing and not fascist, so a pointless investigation by the Guardian.