Front Burner - Trump, Hitler and how democracies die

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Today on the show is historian Timothy Ryback. Timothy is an author and writer with The Atlantic. He’s the director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. Last year he published ‘Takeover’ which documents the ways Hitler and his enablers in the German establishment cleared the pathway to Nazism through constitutional means.He’s on the show to discuss - what he refers to as the “disturbing echoes” between Nazi Germany and contemporary America. Particularly between Adolf Hitler and US President Donald Trump.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

How did the internet go from this? You could actually find what you were looking for right away, bound to this. I feel like I'm in hell. Spoiler alert, it was not an accident. I'm Cory Doctorow, host of Who Broke the Internet from CBC's Understood. In this four-part series, I'm going to tell you

why the internet sucks now, whose fault it is, and my plan to fix it. Find Who Broke the Internet on whatever terrible app you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everyone, it's Jamie. Today on the show, historian Timothy Rybak is with me. Timothy is a historian, author and writer with the Atlantic and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in the Hague. Last year he published Takeover, which documents the ways that Hitler and his enablers in the German establishment cleared the pathway to Nazism through constitutional means. And we wanted to bring him on to discuss some of what he refers to as disturbing echoes

between Nazi Germany and contemporary America, particularly between Adolf Hitler and US President Donald Trump. Democratic governor of Minnesota and former Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz made one of these comparisons just the other day. Donald Trump's modern day guescapo is scooping folks up off the streets. They're in unmarked vans wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons. No chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans and disappeared.

To be clear, there's no way for us to know whether they were actually criminals or not, because they refused to give them a trial. We're supposed to just take their word for it. Historians and political journalists have long made these same parallels, including, but not limited to, Trump's attacks on the media, an assault on the federal bureaucracy, threatening to deploy U.S. soldiers on citizens, and potentially arbitrary detention by removing the right of habeas corpus. Trump and his supporters like Steve Bannon have also openly discussed how he could bend

the law in order to run for a third term. President Trump is going to run for a third term. President Trump is going to run for a third term and President Trump is going to be elected again on the afternoon of January 20th of 2029. He's going to be president of the United States. I'll be talking about much of this and more with Timothy today. Mr. Rybeck, thank you very much for coming onto the show. Hi, Jamie. It's great to be on Frontburner. So I think that we should begin this by addressing a major question many listeners of this episode

are likely to have about the salience or legitimacy of this historical link between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. Many might think of the so-called Godwin's law, this idea that nothing can be compared to the unique evil and depravity of Hitler or the Nazis. And just what do you make of that argument, as a scholar on Germany and as an American, that these comparisons between Trump and Hitler

are inherently inappropriate? Well, I'd say as a historian, and I am a historian, not a political scientist or political theorist, I would never draw a direct line from one historical figure to a contemporary political figure. Because, you know, as we know, history doesn't repeat itself. Every individual is unique. Every context in which they're functioning is unique. Now, can we talk about resonances? Absolutely. And some disturbing echoes, those that there certainly are. You've written authoritatively about how Hitler essentially used democracy, the Constitution, and the law to clear the pathway to Nazism,

that he was intent on destroying democracy using the democratic system itself. I know that this is a big question, but can you talk about Hitler's relationship with democracy and how he went about using it? Well, I think as we all remember, in 1923, Hitler staged this beer hall putch. He tried to overthrow the Weimar Republic through violent means.

He failed. He ended up in prison. Then he began reflecting on political systems. He read extensively. He wrote Mein Kampf. And he emerged from the Landsberg prison in 1924, December of 1924, vowing to destroy democracy through democratic means. And I think what I find interesting, A, about Hitler, but also the people around him, especially his legal advisors, is that as much as they hated democracy, they understood democratic processes and structures as well as anyone. And over the course of the next six, eight years, they learned how to use this system against itself. One of Hitler's closest aides was, or one of his closest lieutenants, was Joseph Goebbelsels who went on to become minister of propaganda.

But Goebbels wrote early on in this process, the big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction. And I think the National Socialists, Hitler in particular, understood this and they exploited every dimension of democracy to bring down the system. I think one of the key moments was in September 1930 when Adolf Hitler appeared before the Constitutional Court, basically the highest court in the land, and he told the judges in court that Article 1 of our Constitution states that the government is an expression

of the will of the people. Hitler speaking says, when I come to power, he says, I will represent the will of the people and I will pour the system, I will shape the system to my own vision, which everyone understood was a fascist dictatorship, which was an astonishing admission in court. I think even more astonishing was the judge's response, which was, so only through constitutional means, to which Hitler crisply replied, Yavoll. He made it very clear from the outset that he was going to function within the parameters of the legal system, but was going to exploit it and use every aspect of it to lead to its own destruction. So, when you look at the current moment that we're in, where does your mind go?

What are some of those troubling echoes that you see here? Well, I think there are a number of them in which we hear about this intention of going after political enemies. What a difference a rigged and crooked election had on our country when you think about it and the people who did this to us should go to jail. They should go to jail. And using the government to pursue those. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the, and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by national guard or if really necessary by the military. The attacks on the press.

A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people and they are, they are the enemy of the people, and they are. They are the enemy of the people. Our current concern is, to what degree will Trump ignore decisions of the courts? And we've seen this happen. District Court Judge James Boasberg said he found, quote, probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt after its willful disregard of his order last month to halt flights, transferring immigration detainees from the U.S. to El Salvador, where they ended up at the notorious Seacourt mega prison.

In some ways, Trump is functioning, I think, with a broader mandate than Hitler had when he came to power. And Hitler's first day in office at his first cabinet meeting, he sat down and he wanted to be dictator on day one. He's sitting there with this cabinet, he outlines the measures he's going to take, and every time he turned around, he was told why he couldn't do this. He wanted to go after the Communist Party. They said, you can't, you're functioning in a democratic system, it's a

legitimate party, you just can't, you know, abolish them. There were constitutional constraints, there were foreign policy constraints, and it took Hitler 53 days to batter his way through this. The most immediate resonances I think I see, one one was the purging of the civil service. One of the first things Hitler did literally within minutes of this first cabinet meeting, he fired several very respected long-serving senior officials in the government. He then assigned Hermann Göring, who later became Herr der Luftwaffe, but he basically sent Hermann Göring in to purge the civil service. And the man went in there and basically said, he sent around a memo to the entire civil service

and he said, anyone who does not have absolute loyalty to the new government, do the quote-unquote honorable thing and resign. He went into the police departments, they fired the heads of the police departments, they cleared out senior people at state radio. They were clearing house, as it were. You know, it makes me think of this quote, when I'm thinking about the contemporary moment that we're in. It's from Project 2025, which is a document that we've covered on the show a lot. One of Project 2025's authors said, we want the bureaucrats to be dramatically affected. When they wake up in the morning,

we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. And of course we know what Elon Musk, Department of Government Efficiency has been doing as well. The interesting thing here, Jamie, is that the symbol used by Elon Musk with this was the chainsaw. This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw!

What was used at that time in the New York Times reported on this, they said that Hitler is taking a steamroller to the civil service or the government in general. But it really was a clearing out of the civil service, a real purge of the government. It was over 30 years ago that Clifford Olson first called me. Secret phone calls from Canada's most notorious serial killer. I knew I was killing the children, but I couldn't stop myself. Now it's time to unearth the tapes because I believe there are still answers to be found.

I'm Arlene Bynum from CBC's Uncovered, Calls from a Killer, available now. The entire body of US law rests on this idea of due process, right? That a person has a right to challenge the legality of their detention in a court of law. And it is this very idea that Donald Trump's senior advisor, Stephen Miller, has called into question. Last week he said, Well, the Constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land,

that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So to say that's an option we're actively looking at. In a bid to deport more alleged illegal immigrants without interference from the courts, Miller has framed this as an emergency measure, saying that the United States is under quote invasion by illegal immigrants. They have also invoked or openly discussed obscure wartime laws. This is settled law. Alien Enemies Act has been on the books and has been upheld for over 200 years.

If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them." To do this, the president would need to invoke a group of laws known as the Insurrection Act which dates from 1807. Habeas Corpus is older than the U.S. Constitution. It has been present in the English speaking world since the 15th century. Just what do you make of this idea, the possible suspension of habeas corpus,

and does it conjure anything up for you from the past? Well, unfortunately it does, and the German word that comes to mind is Schutzhaft, which means protective custody. This was embedded going back into Prussian law back into the 1850s was there. And what Schutthof was, was the ability for the police to take someone into quote unquote, protective custody, either to protect them harm from the public or

to protect the public from harm from this individual. to protect the public from harm from this individual. Now, it was a vaguely conceived process because you were not supposed to detain anyone for an extended amount of time. The idea was you take them briefly into custody, you see if they're gonna be a threat to society or not, and then you either let them go or you present them with a charge,

and then they enter the legal process. What the Nazis did was to take this protective custody and begin rounding up hundreds and then thousands of individuals. And because of this ill-defined timeframe, this protective custody became a permanent state in which people found themselves in a legal grave zone. Because you're not charged with anything, you have no legal recourse. Where this led to, and this was by late March, they had taken thousands and thousands of people, mostly communist, social democrats, and Jews into protective custody. They were packed into gymnasiums, they were packed into schools, and eventually they had to start concentrating them in certain places. And these became known as concentration camps.

And this is where these became collecting points for people who were under protect or taken in under protective custody. Right. So when you hear about a case like the case of Kilmer Obrego Garcia, an immigrant who was wrongly sent to a mega prison in El Salvador recently, despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation due to fear of persecution. Obrego Garcia will never be a Maryland father. He will never live in the United States of America again. He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador So do you still believe he's an illegal alien?

How can I return him to the United States? I smuggled him into the United States. Of course I'm not going to do it. You could get him back. There's a phone on this desk. I could. You could pick it up and all the power of the presidency You could call up the president of El Salvador and say send him back right now And if he were the gentleman that you say he is I would do that. But the court has ordered you to... What are you thinking? You know, of course, the Supreme Court filed a unanimous decision ruling that Garcia's return to the U.S. needed to be facilitated. But Trump himself has described it as a nine zero decision in his favor. After we get out all of the fake news from CNN and

all these other people, we won that case nine to nothing. Saying that the Supreme Court has actually agreed with him, right? Having watched the processes in the Weimar Republic, when a democracy is under threat, you basically have, to my mind, three levels of defense. The first is at the voting booth where each of us cast a vote. We either like the person who's elected or not,

and they then had the government. But your next line of defense are your elected representatives. In Germany, it was in the Reichstag, in the United States, it's in Congress. And it's up then to the elected representatives, the checks and balance system as it exists is there to keep the executive in check from exceeding. Now that is the role of Congress. And we have midterm elections that either reset this or move ahead. And to my mind, the midterm elections coming up will tell us a lot about the

future direction of America. But the third and final line of defense, and you've mentioned this, are the courts, the judicial system, and to what degree the courts will hold these processes in check. A, but B, if the president or the chancellor decides to ignore the courts, what happens after that? And the interesting thing in Germany was when Hitler came to power, the courts began coming up with incredibly contorted decisions on certain cases because they were afraid that if they contradicted the government, if they ruled against the government and the government simply ignored them, the courts would lose all legitimacy. So you sort of watch them doing this final dance of death with democracy as it were,

as the courts struggled to maintain some semblance of rule of law, even as the democratic system was collapsing. You know, we've been wanting to have a conversation like this on the show for some time now. We've spoken with fascism scholars about the threat of American fascism. We've spoken to politicians and authors and economists. And many have left us with the impression that American democracy is indeed under threat in an unprecedented way. But I think there will be many in our audience who hear that and they think that incursions on democracy means tanks in the streets and soldiers at polling stations when really political revolutions or authoritarianism can also be introduced

via paperwork. That coups can also mean lawyers and constitutional experts and bureaucrats quietly strategizing ways to use the established legal order to subvert the government. But what some have referred to as legal nihilism or legal revolution. And to what degree do you believe this was present in Nazi Germany? Do you see elements of it in contemporary America too? I would say that this is one of the more disturbing and possibly even disheartening aspects. Even Even at this point, when you watch Hitler's actions, he functioned within the parameters of the law. As Goebbels said, democracy gives itself, gives its enemies the tools to its own destruction.

But you watched how carefully Adolf Hitler was using this to disassemble the democratic system piece by piece, using constitutional means, sometimes coercion and threats toward political enemies. And I think probably one of the key moments for Hitler was the March 5th election in 1933. What happened was Hitler, at his best in an open and free election, only received 37% of the vote. So frankly, Donald Trump is polling numbers

that Adolf Hitler could never have dreamed of in a free and open election. But Hitler wanted to reach a 51% absolute majority. He never did this, even in this March 5th election, when the political system, when he had control over the radio, when he had suppressed a lot of the political parties, there had been this famous Reichstag fire in which basically Congress went up in flames. They declared a national emergency, this was a week before the elections. Even with all of that, Hitler only managed 44% of the vote. That's the most he ever did. However, he used the parliamentary system of multiple parties to basically begin to disassemble the Weimar Republic. The final moment came on March 23rd when he put before the Reichstag, the Congress 600-member body, he wanted an enabling act which would give him four years of dictatorial power, basically suspended everything in the

Constitution, made Hitler dictator. A question many have through periods like this is how and why establishment figures accommodate and even conspire with authoritarian leaders. Just going through your work, I found it interesting the degree to which German elites believed Hitler to be crazy or fascistic, and yet found ways to justify continuing to work with him, like German President Hindenburg, who accommodated Hitler despite understanding him to be dangerous, or former Chancellor Schleicher, who had a strategy he referred to as a taming process,

which was supposed to be a way to sideline the radicals of the Nazi party and bring the movement into mainstream politics. And how did Germany's political establishment fail to stop or even conspire with Hitler? Well, this is where he was just massively underestimated. When Hitler was appointed chancellor in January of 30, the operative phrases were,

soup is never eaten as hot as it's cooked so that he will be much calmer once he's in office. He was boxed in, he only had three seats in the cabinets. And one of the operative phrases was, in two months we'll have him in such a tight corner, he'll squeak. And the idea was that they could contain him. Oh, the other person I think I might mention here, I think is important, is one is the politicians, but the others are the industrialists. And this is

also where I do see some unfortunate parallels with what happened in the United States. Keep in mind, when you hear the word national socialism, okay? This was the Nazi party. They were nationalists, but they were also socialists. Now this is not something that the industrial elite or the bankers wanted anything to do with. And Hitler really was considered a pariah. There were a couple of individuals, but for the most part, the German business community kept their distance from Hitler. But then once he comes to power, suddenly you see these companies, one after the other, lining up behind him. The most chilling to my mind is the company called IG Farben, which was

the ultimate product of the Weimar Republic. It was founded in the mid-1920s, became the largest pharmaceutical and chemical company in the world. A lot of Nobel Prize laureates, a lot of Jewish individuals, scientists, not a single Nazi on the board of directors. Hitler comes to power and within a decade, IG Farben is the company that's producing the cyclone B gas for the extermination facilities at Auschwitz. So it's how these companies get on board with certain things, but how you get off this train once it's rolling down the tracks into this nightmare moment is not night. I think if anything, corporations should be cautious about what they find themselves committing to as these things move forward.

So just when you saw the head of all those tech companies, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Elon, all lined up at the inauguration. What was kind of briefly going through your head? Well, what was going through my head when I watched this were the corporate executives who were lining up back in 1933. And the justification at that time was our primary obligation is to our shareholders, and they needed to be in alignment with the government if they were to get government contracts. The problem is what direction your government heads in. And when you do get the government contract

for producing cyclone B gas for Auschwitz, I'm not sure that's any place any corporation really wants to be. ["The Last Supper"] ["The Last Supper"] It's been reported in mainstream media that Trump has for years now floated the idea of deploying active soldiers onto the streets of American cities to deal with protesters or what he has referred to as the quote, enemy within. This plan is reported to include the invocation

of the Insurrection Act, a law that gives the president broad powers to use the military for domestic law enforcement. One senior member of the team behind Project 2025 said, quote, we want to be able to shut down the riots and not have the legal community or the defense community come in and say, that's an inappropriate use of what you're trying to do. You've written about similar ongoings in Germany where Hitler desired to use the army to crush public unrest, eventually developing what was called a shooting degree,

right? And what do you make of Trump's impulses to deploy active duty soldiers against Americans? Well, I have to put on my historian's cap here and say I'm not a political commentator of contemporary events. But what I will tell you is one moment in one of Hitler's first cabinet meetings, when he talks about wanting to take on some fairly draconian policies. And one of the cabinet members says, well, this may cause a lot of social unrest. And Hitler then says, well, can we call in the army to quell this? The Blomberg, who was the equivalent of the Secretary of Defense, says to Hitler, I'm sorry, Mr. Chancellor, but German soldiers are trained to fight an external enemy. It is unimaginable to me that a German soldier would ever be

ordered to shoot a German citizen. And Hitler was told that to his face directly at the very beginning. One might hope that a similar ethic might prevail 80 years later, almost 100 years later. I'm sorry. I can't believe we're having this conversation almost a century later. You have already spoken throughout this conversation about the Weimar Republic, which are the democratic years in Germany just before the introduction of Nazism. But I just wonder if you wanted to expand a little more on what you think made it an era that could be exploited by radicals and revolutionaries in government and whether you see sort of any viable, any more viable comparisons between that time and modern day

America. Well, I guess what I would say on this, back in the 1980s, I was a graduate student at Harvard University. I was teaching a class on Weimar in Nazi Germany as a teaching fellow. And I was always an apologist for the Weimar Republic. I used to tell the students, look, it was a democracy that only lasted, it was in existence for 13 years, basically a half a generation of experience with democratic processes and values. I said, you can't compare that with the United States of America, which at that time, we'd had more than 10, what, 12 generations of Americans with this democratic experience. And at that moment, it was inconceivable to me that we could be in a moment like this. In retrospect, it's incredible how naive that

assessment was. Where this goes, I cannot say, but I think for us to look into the past for examples, for resonances, for cautionary tales. I think it's definitely worth doing. There are lessons to be learned from the past. Mr. Ryback, thank you so much for being here. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much, Jamie. It was very nice being on Front Burner.

All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.