On with Kara Swisher - Lessons Learned From Hitler’s Rise To Power

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

There are a lot of Trump/Hitler comparisons being thrown around these days. So we went to the source, as chronicled by historian Timothy Ryback in his new book Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. Ryback zooms in on the final six months before Adolf Hitler dissolved the government of the Weimar Republic, revealing that Nazi Germany was not inevitable. Kara and Ryback discuss the Berlin power players that misjudged Hitler’s bankrupt party, and the (not just rhetorical) similarities between the ascendance of Hitler and Donald Trump. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on social media. We’re on Instagram/Threads as @karaswisher and @nayeemaraza Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer. Get started at HubSpot.com slash marketers. Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. As the old saying goes, while history may not repeat itself, it does rhyme. Case in point, Donald Trump. The former president and his MAGA stands are often compared to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. After all, Trump has repeatedly used incendiary

language and promoted xenophobic and racist tropes that are troubling. He inspires utter devotion of his followers. But is it just talk, and is the comparison unfair? Or are there structural similarities not just between the movements, but also between Germany's Weimar Republic and the political fragmentation that we're seeing in America that should give us pause? And are there any conclusions we can draw as we look ahead to the Trump-Biden rematch in November? Or should this all remain in the dustbin of history as a cautionary tale that will never happen again? It's also the story of misinformation and the politics of grievance, which is my area of expertise, or what used to be called propaganda. Given the stakes, I wanted to bring in an expert, historian Timothy Ryback, whose latest book,

Takeover, Hitler's Final Rise to Power, chronicles the six months leading up to Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, and all of the political dealings that were happening behind the scenes. Our question this week comes from fellow historian and NYU professor Ruth Ben-Gayat, author of Strong Men, Mussolini to the Present. We'll have all that and more after a quick break. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter.

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Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Welcome, Timothy, or Professor Ryback. Thank you, Cara. Would you like to be called Professor Ryback? I usually call professors that. No, I left academia 30 years ago. All right, Tim.

And I've never looked back. I loved it when I was there, but no, no, no, no, no. Tim is great. Well, you know, I work with someone who likes to be called professor. Anyway, so I want to start off talking about your new book, Takeover. There are dozens, if not hundreds of books about Hitler already out there. You've written three of them yourself. Talk about why this new one and why now? Adam Gopnik wrote a review in the New Yorker two weeks ago. And it opens with that question. Now, imagine an author, you've written this book, and you really say, why in God's name do we need another book on Hitler?

I'm not sure it quite said that. But from your perspective, why now? Yeah, that's how I read it. And it was like, oh, God, what am I in for? And then he got it. And I'll tell you what I did, what brought me to this. There are a lot of issues with the United States that compelled me to write it. But the way I wrote it, what historians not tend to do, what they need to do is to, you need to look at where we started, where we ended up, and then explain how we got there.

So most books on Hitler, rightfully so, explain Hitler's rise to power. Well, what it is, you need to look at things that make sense to how we got where we got. So you eliminate all the other noise around it, but you end up with something that looks like historical inevitability. It's kind of like if I were to say, well, actually, I think you would have an opinion, but, you know, look, in November of this year, there's going to be a presidential election.

We have no idea how things are going to end up, but I promise you, a week after the election, the pundits are going to look at it and put all the pieces together to tell us why one person won and why one person lost. And you're going to go, well, of course. And so that's sort of what I did with this. So what I did, I forgot everything I knew about National Socialism, about Hitler, and I started reading the daily press starting in July of 1932. And I used diaries, daily diaries. I used meeting protocols, but I left out everything else and just tried to see where we were going to go.

The idea is it's not inevitable, right? That it was, you didn't necessarily, it could go a lot of different directions. Well, more than that, it was incredible that the guy made it. Yeah. You never realize how perilous his situation actually was at the time. All right. So I think most people know the rough outlines of the events that led to Hitler taking power in World War I, Treaty of Versailles, Weimar Republic, and what happened after he assumed power in World War II and the Holocaust. This book chronicles the missing middle. And you're dealing with just six months in 1932, just before Hitler became

chancellor in 1933. Talk about why it was important to limit it to that short amount of time and what people need to know about this time period to understand how it happened. Talk about the limit of time that you used, which I thought was very deft. Okay, well, what it is, there was an election, the Reichstag election, which was the 600-seat parliament, the Congress of Germany, there was a July election, and the Nazis got 37% of the vote. It was double what they'd gotten in the last election. Suddenly, Hitler was leading the largest party in the country, the most powerful. And so that was really what appeared to be his high watermark. And so I said, well, this took everybody's breath away.

And what normally would happen, whoever commanded the largest party would then build a coalition, which would give you basically 51% of the vote, and then you would be appointed chancellor. President Hindenburg, who was head of state, appointed the chancellor as head of the government. That was seen to be suddenly the Nazis were the largest, most powerful political force in the country. And I thought, well, this is a good starting point. Yeah. Now, he had lost, for people who don't know, in 1932, he had lost his bid for presidency by more than six million votes. And they were still in the minority. And President von Hindenburg, as you noted, and others spent a lot of time trying not to put him in power.

So these are two important elections. I'd love to get a sense of how Hitler dealt with them. Well, there are two things here. One is the presidential election, where it was the first and only time Hitler ran for political office. He lost by six million votes. And this is when you go down, you know, everyone knows that. But when you go and you once again start reading the daily press and looking at the details of this, Hitler was very unhappy about this. He ended up going to court claiming voter fraud and irregularities by the various state officials. And he went to court to have the election results annulled. The judge threw them out on his ear. There were some slight

irregularities, but there was nothing that would justify annulling the election because of the six million vote difference. That was the one election. That was in the spring of 32. But then they had the Reichstag elections were at the end of July. And Hitler really, you know, the Nazis went full out on this and in fact surged to 37%, which should have positioned Hitler to be appointed chancellor. But they didn't. They didn't. Talk about why they tried not to,

despite the fact that he would have and should have been appointed at that point. Well, you know, Hindenburg is president of the country. Article 53, Powers of the Constitution, gives him the capacity to appoint and dismiss chancellors at will. And Hindenburg disliked Hitler. He disdained him. He found that he was a very divisive political force. He hated Hitler's anti-Semitism. He disliked everything about the man. There was also this, there was a class issue here.

Hitler was actually an Austrian originally from backwoods Austria. Hindenburg is this great Prussian war hero. Hitler was a corporal during the war and never moved beyond that rank famously. And Hindenburg used to refer to him as that bohemian corporal. They did arrange for a meeting in August, right after the election. So Hindenburg said, okay, I'll talk to this guy. And they knew it was going to be not a great meeting, but Hitler assumed that he would possibly be appointed chancellor. So he went in to see Hindenburg, and Hindenburg basically never even sat down with the guy. He just read him the riot

act, this divisive language, the radicalism, the intransigence. And he said, for the sake of God, my country, and my conscience, I would never appoint you as chancellor. Hitler is, you know, it's— It's pushed off. It's pushed off. So many thought of him as a buffoon, the much as they talk about Trump, for example, and also crazy.

Many thought of him as a buffoon, the much as they talk about Trump, for example, and also crazy. And he dipped away from lunacy to convince them otherwise then, because he needed to seem non-crazy at the time, because he certainly was immune from shame, right? He changed his affect. Talk about that.

Yeah, Hitler was very much viewed as a buffoon. He was absolutely a political outsider. But he was incredibly determined, and his calculation on this with his 37%, and there is a bit of method to this madness. Hitler claimed that he had 37% of the vote. He said 37% is 75% of 51%. So I have the majority of the majority. So I should be chancellor. And that was the logic that he was using. He didn't get that. He could have entered into coalitions, but he would not join anyone.

I mean, it was, he would not compromise. Which was typical. A coalition would have been typical, correct, that he would join with another side. That's how governments were run, exactly. And so, but what he then did, he did two things. One is he couldn't become chancellor with the 37%, but he could gridlock the legislative process. So with that 37%, they made it impossible to run the Reichstag, to pass laws. It just basically paralyzed the function of the democracy. Then Hitler declared that he was going to run again. So they dissolved the Reichstag because of gridlock and called for new elections in November. And then Hitler vowed to get 51%

or more of the vote. So he just would have a clear majority and would, in a sense, have to be appointed chancellor. Right, they'd force him. Now, there's a group of supporting characters, or many with outsized roles, that I don't think were household names in the same way that Goering and Goebbels were. Gregory Stasser, for example,

who you describe as the number two in the Nazi party right up until Hitler's ascent to power. Explain who he was and how things might have been different if he had taken the reins, because the powers that were at the time attempted to do a range of things to keep Hitler out of power. And using Strasser was one of them. Yeah, Gregor Strasser was the number two person next to Hitler in the party. And the name of the party was, they were called National Socialists. Hitler was the nationalist part of the equation.

Gregor Strasse was the socialist. And he really was a committed socialist. So he could speak to workers in a way and appeal to them in a way that Hitler didn't, especially in the northern part of the country. I mean, Hitler had this Austrian accent, this inflammatory rhetoric. He was this odd kind of guy. Strasse was kind of your standard-issue politician.

He was a glad-hander, you know, a baby-holder. He could sit and drink beer with people. And he was much more popular in the northern half of the country than Hitler was. So in a sense, he's been erased from history because Hitler, first of all, sidelined him and then ultimately had him killed. But at the time, and this is one of these people who tend to disappear, you don't realize how consequential and important Strasser was to this. He was popular also with political elite. They wanted to bring him into the power structure, but he didn't. He didn't go with them. No, well, he didn't. But what happened was Hitler, in the meeting with Hindenburg in August, they said, well, look, why don't you

be vice chancellor and then prove yourself, and then you can eventually step into the role of chancellor. Hitler would have none of it. Strasse ended up being offered the vice chancellorship. And when Hitler got word of this, he went ballistic. Hitler saw this as the ultimate betrayal, and it nearly destroyed the Nazi party. It was, without question, the biggest crisis the party faced. This was in December of 32. And Strasser ended up walking away while still declaring allegiance to the party. So he could have been a spoiler for Hitler. You also call Kurt von, I think it's Schleicher, the ultimate Berlin power broker. He was minister of defense,

trusted by President von Hindenburg. Talk about his importance, because he tried very hard to stop Hitler, even though he was probably too clever by a half, but he had his own fall of grace and later was murdered by Hitler. Talk about his role. correspondent there, you know, but basically, you know, he said, there's one person at the center of anything that goes on with political power in Berlin, and that's Kurt von Schleicher. Part of it was, Schleicher was not only general, he had also been in charge of military intelligence, so he basically had spies, he had information networks everywhere, including, and this is one thing that I've discovered in the course of writing the book, that there was a spy among Hitler's key lieutenants in the Brown House, which was the Nazi party headquarters in Munich, that Hitler never knew

about. And so what Schleicher was getting throughout all of this, Schleicher was getting actionable intelligence. So he really figured that he could play Hitler. He knew what the problems were in the party. He knew what things to exploit. He's the one who actually approached Strauss. who actually approached Strauss. What I should mention is, you know,

Hitler wanted this 51% in the November election, okay? Not only did he not get 51%, he dropped to 33%. They lost 2 million votes. They lost votes. It was a catastrophe. People were saying that Hitler had misplayed his cards. This was even within the Nazi party. And then that's when Schleicher moved in and he said, look, I can divide the party.

Let me offer Strasse the vice chancellorship. He can bring his part of the party with him. And that would basically divide and possibly destroy or disable the Nazi party as a political force or as the leading political force. But Strasser walked away. Well, Strasser walked away when Hitler discovered this. He called a meeting of all the key Nazi officials. And what he told Goebbels separately, he says, you know, if the party dissolves, he said, I'll put a bullet in my head in three minutes. But he called everybody together and he basically browbeat everyone into supporting him in this meeting. And then you say, that's when Strasse walked away.

He took a medical leave. He said, I'm going off for a while. Now, you write also about Schleicher's good friend, General Kurt von Hammerstein Eckhardt, I think. He was head of the Reichswehr. The German military was much smaller at the time than Hitler's own militia. Is that correct? And explain what his role was, Hammerstein's. Well, Hammerstein was a close associate of Schleicher. I think the key thing that Hammerstein was willing to do, he said that if the Nazis, the Nazis were basically threatening violence, which was if Hitler's not appointed chancellor, there will be a violent revolution. And the question was, if the Nazis had risen up,

the communists, which were also a very consequential political force, would have risen up and there would have been a civil war in the country. On the streets. On the streets. Because there was a proliferation of guns. There was a proliferation of guns on the streets. There's such street violence, yeah, that the newspapers were publishing casualty lists of what they called the country's ongoing civil war. So these two could have acted in a military coup, correct? And they didn't. Well, no, more importantly, what Hammerstein was willing to do was to fire on the Nazis, which the big question was, where did things stand? If Hitler with his million plus SA people rose up in a violent revolt, the fact was the German military, though it was restricted to 100,000, they would have crushed a Nazi revolt. There's no question about that. And

Hammerstein's willingness to do this, put things on notice. But yes, and then there was the question of Schleicher and Hammerstein possibly, as you said, launching a military coup. Had they crushed the Nazis in an armed revolt like that, I don't think there would have been a necessity for that. So why didn't the pair do that? Why didn't Hammerstein and Schleicher do that? What happened was the, there was on top of sitting on top of all of this is President von Hindenburg. And the question of Hammerstein and Schleicher launching a military coup against the government never would have worked because at the end of the day, the military would have never turned on Hindenburg. He was just such a consequential figure. And the interesting part about Hindenburg is that he was a monarchist at heart, but he was also a military man who took orders.

He'd retired before World War I. War broke out. He had to go fight for his fatherland. So he became the great field marshal, the great hero of the war. He then retired after the war. Field Marshal, the great hero of the war. He then retired after the war. Then the country was, you know, in disarray that he was asked to run for president. He was not a friend of constitutional democracy, but he cared more about his country. And so he became president. He was elected president for a seven-year term. After that, and this is in the spring of 32, he wants to then retire again,

but Hitler is there running for president. So Hindenburg is forced to run for president at the age of 84 again. So he's old, right? For him, these were seven-year terms. It was essentially a death sentence in office, yeah. Right, so you have conflicting reports about his ability to lead. So if he, because they did not want to act against Hindenburg, the two others, and he was incapacitated by his age, correct? That there was, that Hitler was able to run into this breach. You know, this is one of the,

I carry this one of these big questions, and this is where you read everyone's diaries, you read the press you know there's talk that he he had dementia that he was a puppet of everyone else there are these eyewitness accounts saying oh i was at this at this um gala event and hindenburg you know was you know this dottering old guy barely able to get out two sentences. But then you look at, I'm sorry, but you look at the meeting protocols in which he is. And you see somebody, there is absolute clarity.

This is a guy who knows exactly what he's doing. He's calling people out on things. I would argue that the man was in full control of his capacities at that time. But just unwilling to crush Hitler. Just unwilling to crush Hitler. Well, yeah, this is the only place where I thought... Hindenburg really became a hero of mine in reading this, only because he suppressed so much of his own instincts and desires, which was a restoration of the monarchy. He was following the Constitution to the letter. As one person said, he sort of read it the way a junior officer read a field manual. He was there for his country. If the democratic

system, the constitution was there, he was going to follow the constitution to the letter. Where I fault him, he basically got boxed into a corner. He had broken with Schleicher, so he didn't have any viable candidates there. So he was convinced that they could keep Hitler boxed in. Boxed in. I'll go into that in a second. But let's talk about the role of the press, one of Hitler's political frenemies, Alfred Hugenberg, who was a big shot media mogul at

the time. His company owned 1,600 newspapers across the country and all manner of other media like newsreels. You write about his influence, but also the fact that every party has its own propaganda outlet, basically. Talk about Hugenberg and the role that this very splintered media landscape played. He sounds a lot like Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, by the way. In fact, he practiced katastrophenpolitik, which loosely translates into catastrophe politics of cultural warfare, in which it aimed to, quote, flood the public space with inflammatory news stories,

half-truths, rumors, and outright lies. Talk very briefly about his role here. Yeah, Hugenberg is one of these people, as you said, that have been sort of left behind by history in a way, when you're really in the day-by-day news. This guy's controlling 1,600 newspapers. He is the most powerful media force in the country, especially because he's reaching,

these newspapers are in heartland Germany, and he's reaching huge swaths of the public of it. He's a vowed enemy of democracy, and he believes that you destroy democracy by splintering through, as you said, this katastrophenpolitik, by fracturing public consensus around any issue and radicalizing people. And he would bring in wedge issues. And he would bring in wedge issues. He was also a member of the Reichstag, and he introduced a bill in the Reichstag that would suspend the Treaty of Versailles, all the provisions of it. But more importantly, there was an article in there that said that any signatories of the Treaty of Versailles would be executed. And this was a bill that was put before the Reichstag.

Versailles would be executed. And this was a bill that was put before the Reichstag. What happens is if you got a certain percentage, if the Reichstag declined it, it would actually go to a public referendum. So this goes out into the public sphere. And you've got to be, you know, in Germany, you know, we've got our issues in the States. It's an issue. You're either for or against the Treaty of Versailles. Another story he got out, and this was my favorite, is complete fake news, but that the German government was taking teenage men and women and selling them into slavery abroad to pay off the German war debts. It's a complete invention, but you're reading this in these newspapers and you see them there and it's just,

this is in the press. So he was flooding the public space with very divisive, contentious issues as a way of fracturing the middle. And this is, you know, his katastrophenpolitik is to drive people right and left, let the center collapse. Collapse, right, right.

Yeah, and he was even more right-wing. He sometimes allied with Hitler, sometimes opposed, correct? Yeah, well, the problem was they both had equally big egos. At his rallies, people used to say Heil Hugenberg. But the most important thing is, he only controlled about 40 Reichstag delegates, but Hitler needed these. Needed them. He was the one man who could make or break Hitler, and Hitler knew it.

Right. So that's why they lied. Now, you write also about how Hitler spent a lot of time courting the foreign press, including American journalists, especially Frederick Birchall of The New York Times, who's perhaps the worst political prognosticator of all time, I think. Talk about his role in specifics. He kept dismissing Hitler and also normalizing him in a lot of ways to readers in the United States. Well, actually, what put me under the whole book was a New York Times headline the day after Hitler was appointed chancellor. It was, Hitler abandons aims to be dictator. And I sort of went, wow. I said, you know, what we do, you know, this is, this is the day Hitler becomes dictator. But when you're looking at the press at the time and the way,

this is the New York Times, right? Right, yeah. And Bertschall was a very smart guy. Look, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Germany. But he did get things wrong. He's the one who claimed that 37% were the Nazis' high watermark. By the fall of 32, he was saying the Germans have gotten tired of the Nazis. And, you know, once again, I thought it was important to include this in the book

so that you understood that this was not inevitable that Hitler came to power. You know, you can look at all the pieces that explain and show us how Hitler ended up as chancellor and seizing power. But what gets filtered out are all of these other versions of what could be happening. You also spent a lot of time talking about his financiers, but you do talk about his finances. Hitler was bogged down in lawsuits and was battling tax authorities, also similar. So Hitler was in debt, the Nazi party was also in debt, and yet he came back from that. Talk about that a little bit. Well, actually, yeah, this is interesting. First of all, Hitler's private lawyer, Hans Frank, who was ultimately executed at Nuremberg for his role in the Nazi atrocity. But, you know,

at Nuremberg for his role in Nazi atrocity. But Hans Frank said he represented Hitler in 140 cases in court. And he said what people didn't realize, every time Hitler went into court, he ended up getting more votes. He basically used courtrooms for political grandstanding. That was an amazing dynamic. But what Hitler was trying to do at this time,

and this is related to both the court cases, but also the finances around it. Hitler was banned from the radio because of his radicalism. These other parties had huge networks. radicalism. These other parties had huge networks. Hitler didn't have any way of reaching the people. So what he did produce in the summer of 32, he produced a record album that he distributed to get his voice out. The most innovative thing he did, no German politician had done this before, and I'm not sure any US politician had. politician had even done it at that point. He leased Lufthansa Airplane, and he basically was the first political figure to hold rallies flying from one location to the day, sometimes landing in farmer's fields, going into villages and talking to people. So he was able to do five, six villages or hold five, six rallies a day,

hundreds of cities that he visited. But what it was, this was the least airplane, and Hitler piled up a lot of debt. There are various estimates on this, but it is running into the millions and millions of dollars was one of the estimates in today's dollars. But Hitler was hugely in debt. And what happened was when Hitler refused the vice chancellorship in August, and then when he took the beating at the polls in November down to 33%. He started a hemorrhaging membership. From the financial perspective, his big financial backers started backing off because they just said this guy had misplayed his cards.

And they wanted Hitler to compromise. And so the Nazi party was essentially bankrupt by January, bankrupt in hemorrhaging members. So how did he come back? How did he come back from that then? He didn't come back. He was rescued by the appointment as chancellor. They were positioning. There was a lot of backroom dealing there. They got some financiers to back part of it, but basically Hitler's appointment

as chancellor stunned everyone. I mean, it just came out of the blue. There's a cartoon in a left-wing newspaper called Fawwatz, a week before Hitler's appointed chancellor, it shows Hitler as Hamlet standing in a cemetery of broken swastika crosses. It's basically standing in the graveyard of this political movement. The title is The New Hamlet. But this is how he was being viewed in late January. The next week, the guy's appointed chancellor. One of the things that's interesting is this idea of taming him, which is the Samungsprozess, which obviously didn't work. But he played into this, correct, with the people in order to get that appointment, that he was, they had the ability to tame him. Well, this was Schleicher's Samungsprozess, exactly.

Schleicher had, and this was one of the arguments used for convincing Hindenburg to appoint Hitler. They said, look, one of the phrases is, soup is never eaten as hot as it's cooked. And once Hitler is in the chancellorship, he only had three seats for Nazis on the cabinet. So he would be basically boxed in. He would cool his rhetoric, and all would be well. And frankly, yeah, Hitler, I don't know if it's outsmarted people, but he really played this well. And this is the one place where I do fault Hindenburg. Hindenburg had the capacity, Article 53 powers, to dismiss Hitler at will.

He dismissed three previous chancellors in the previous, what, eight or nine months. And there was nothing stopping him from dismissing Hitler. I think the key event that followed was in February, the Reichstag fire. It was claimed to be a communist coup or an attempted coup. No one still knows what actually happened, but Hitler used this to suspense the whole Reich. Yeah. And that's basically when... And we know the rest. Yeah, we know the rest of the story. We know the rest. So you write at the end of this book, it's been said that the Weimar Republic died twice. It was murdered and it committed suicide. There's a little mystery to the murder. Hitler vowed to destroy democracy through democratic process, and he did.

An act of state suicide is more complicated, especially when it involves a democratic republic with a full complement of constitutional protections the the murderer would be hitler who if you had to pick one was the one who committed suicide or was it a process of of of having a multi-party system that nobody ever could act so we understand the murderer correct or maybe we don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, there's no question about that. The perpetrator there is very clear. Hans Frank, before he was executed at Nuremberg, said something very interesting. He said, we Nazis came to power in 33 at the only moment when that was possible. Had we tried to do that 10 years earlier, the German people would have simply retreated back into the monarchy. Had we tried to do this a decade later, there would have been an entire generation imbued with democratic values. But he said, we came at this perfect

moment where it was too late for the German people to escape back to the monarchy or save themselves into future with a strong democracy. So I think part of it was it was a fresh democracy, a new democracy. But I think the drivers to that, one, were a lot of politicians wanting to put their political interests ahead of the nation to that, one, were a lot of politicians wanting to put their political interests ahead of the nation. But more importantly, and this is where I'll bring Hugenberg in, I think the divisive media played an incredible role in dividing the public. Hugenberg, with this katastrophenpolitik strategy in hollowing out the center, with this katastrophenpolitik strategy in hollowing out the center,

forcing these wedge issues in there. And I think the public became polarized and ultimately it was a democracy. Hitler never received more than 37% of the vote in an open election. But I think I would blame the political leadership for playing games and basically Hitler outplaying them at their game, but also I think the role of the media

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from the get-go. And LegalZoom saves you from wasting hours making sense of the legal stuff. Thank you. And use promo code VOXBIZ to get 10% off any LegalZoom business formation product, excluding subscriptions and renewals. Expires December 31st, 2024. Get everything you need from setup to success at LegalZoom.com. And use promo code VOXBIZ. LegalZoom.com and use promo code VOXBIZ. LegalZoom provides access to independent attorneys and self-service tools. LegalZoom is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice except for authorized through its subsidiary law firm, LZ Legal Services, LLC. Okay, so every week we get a question. I'm

going to try to bring it into today. We get a question from an outside excerpt. This week, our question is from Ruth Van Guyet, the author of Strong Men, Mussolini to the Present. Let's listen to what her question for you is. I'm Ruth Ben-Gayat. I write about fascism, authoritarianism, and propaganda. My big question is, what do you say to the it-can't-happen-here crowd who would read your book as history but don't believe there are any lessons in it for the present. So what is that? Your book does not make a reference to Trump. There are a lot of obvious parallels between him and Hitler and the MAGA movement and the Nazis. Talk about that. What do you say to the it-can't-happen-here crowd, as Ruth asks?

Let me tell you this. I used to say it can't happen. And back in the 1980s, as a graduate student at Harvard, I taught in a course called Weimar Nazi Culture. I used to use that Hans Frank quote about Weimar being such a young democracy. I held up the United States and said, look, America's had 200 plus years. It just needed more time, as Hans Frank said. Cara, part of the reason I wrote this book was because as I was watching U.S. politics, I was hearing a lot of these resonances off of there. What I did not want to do was to write a polemic, like a sticker book version of, oh yeah, you know, Trump is Hitler, though some of the phrases are stunning. In advance of the November 32 election, Hitler told his followers at a rally to be there. He said, es wird wild werden,

which is either it's going to be wild, verbatim. So you can find a lot of these things, but that was not my intent. My intent was to figure out what the average person was seeing, what they were going through. And that's why I basically wrote the book by just following the daily newspapers. I said the diaries day by day. The more I got into this and the more I found, frankly, the more unsett, I've said the diaries day by day, the more I got into this and the more I found, frankly, the more unsettled I became, the more deeply, deeply unsettled. I would not blame Trump and I don't blame Hitler. I basically, using that equation,

the quote about Weimar Germany died twice, I actually would fault in a democratic system, I fault the public at large. I think the media is playing a very dangerous role in all of this. And yeah, frankly, it could happen here. It really, well, you realize it really could happen. Yeah, well, you're just using the same wording. It's happen here. It really, well, you realize it really could happen. Yeah, well, you're using the same wording. It's the same. And speaking of that, Trump has said immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. And there are many parallels to Trump in the book, like Hitler being the first, as you said, to use campaign by airplane or focusing on rallies as small local elections in remote places, repeatedly exaggerating his wins and selling his losses as wins.

You keep thinking as you read it, just like Trump. As a historian, you're writing history as much as reiterating it. What would you say to the criticism, if there was a criticism you cherry-picked here, intentionally highlighting issues where people equate Trump with Hitler? And what would you say to refute that comparison? Because the comparisons are vast and massive. Like you just mentioned court cases, using court cases to push yourself. Taxes, the same thing. Tax problems, financial problems. It's rather close. Talk about the idea of pushing back people who say, you know, you cherry pick those issues. Because when you say Hitler, everybody runs screaming from the room, right? If that's the worst insult you can make

of a politician, presumably. Okay, I guess, Carol, what I would say is read the book, because if you read the book, there are as many chapters focusing on issues in society that have nothing to do with Hitler, but that focus on a lot of other issues. Hugenberg hated Hitler. Hugenberg didn't care about Hitler. Hugenberg was out to- So does Rupert Murdoch. Yeah, exactly.

So does Rupert Murdoch. And Hugenberg just wanted to destroy democracy. He saw himself ultimately in some role, which would have been ridiculous. But it was, you know, look at the gridlock in Congress. This isn't about Hitler. These are about, you know, the social Democrats refusing to work with the Communist Party or the centrists refusing to work with the SPD. I mean, there were so many solutions there. You mentioned the guns, the gun violence there. This has nothing to do with Hitler. This has to do with gun violence. There was a cabinet meeting where they looked at how they could introduce gun control legislation. And one of the things was

to introduce a law that would anyone who committed a political crime with a weapon and killed someone would have capital punishment. They said, we can't do that. It would turn the courts into killing machines. There was such a proliferation of guns that it became impossible. When you read that, it sounds exactly like the debates we're having, the discussions we're having in the States. It has nothing to do with Hitler or with Trump. It lot of people fleeing the Bolsheviks in the east but also other reasons coming into Germany, there was a real problem there. One thing that, and there had been a murder case

where Germans had murdered a Polish immigrant. Actually, some of them were Nazis. Once again, a hugely divisive issue. Hitler said, and the Germans were ultimately sentenced to death for having killed this foreigner. Hitler used this as political capital. He said, if I am chancellor, never would a foreign life be put above that of a German. So long response to say there's a lot going on in the book. There's a lot of confusion within society,

and that's specifically why I use that quote about it dying twice, because Hitler could never have succeeded if people weren't there to vote for him. Trump, it's a democracy. He should be able to say whatever he wants to say, but it's the fact that he's getting better percentage. You can't compare him to Hitler because he's getting better percentages than Hitler. Hitler never only got 37%. Right. So we started talking about how Hitler had vowed to destroy democracy through democracy. Trump has put forward Agenda 47,

a list of policies he says he will enact, including first and foremost to give the president unchecked power over federal agencies like the FCC and the FTC. It would also enable him to bypass Congress. Sounds like there's enabling law. There's also Project 2025, which is being organized by the Heritage Foundation. This is a plan to recruit pro-Trump conservatives and install them across the federal bureaucracy. What are your thoughts on this? Are there any comparables here in this idea? Again, I would agree with you. You have to look at the voter

and the things that are animating them at the time. Well, I think what's clear is that everything you state there is, to some of us, a terrifying prospect, right? But he's telling us, he's giving us the agenda. Hitler did exactly the same thing. There's one court trial I talk about in the book where Hitler basically says, the Article I of the Constitution says that the government should express the will of the people. And he said that I have the people and Hitler was saying that he wants to destroy democracy through

democratic means. Um, the judge says, but only within the parameters of the constitution. And Hitler says, yes, um, he, there were no surprises with what Hitler brought to the table, just as with Trump. You know, the other Trump-Hitler comparison, which just bogs my mind, is vengeance on political opponents. Hitler said, if once I'm in power, heads will roll. So we see exactly what we're getting. I think the difference between the two is that Hitler only had 37 percent, and we'll see whether or not Trump gets 51 percent or plus. It's a number that Hitler never reached. Right. So at the end of the book, you ask these questions. Might a better designated constitution have been less susceptible to dictatorial instrumentalization, a less polarized electorate,

more resilient to partisan manipulation? Could political leadership more committed to democratic values have provided a bulwark against more extremist tendencies? Or would a younger, less world-weary head of state have been able to guide the nation through the political and economic turmoil of the day, to more stable times. So comment on how that compares to now. You were asking, would any of these things have worked in Hitler's time? And what's our most vulnerable part of this equation, which is a pretty ugly equation? Well, I'll tell you what. Schleicher asked Hindenburg

for six months. He said, just give me six more months. Had Schleicher remained chancellor for six more months into the summer, first of all, a lot of the onerous provisions of the Treaty of Versailles had been lifted. Hitler was bankrupt. He was hemorrhaging membership. Hitler would not have survived another six months. There would have been no Third Reich. There would have been no dictatorship. I don't know what Germany's future democracy would have looked like, but Hitler would not have been part of that scene. There's one pundit who said this, I love he said, Hitler is a man with a great future behind him. I think with Trump, this is his last go at it, right? Look how old he would be in the next election round,

but I don't think he would make it. If we get over the line with this one in November, I think you would find a political force that will dissipate and never go away. But this really is the, as our friend Fred Birchall would say, this is the high watermark. Right, except Trump and the Republican Party announced today they raised more than $65 million in March.

He's basically taken over the GOP. He's leading Biden in six of seven swing states, according to the polls. How do you look at that? Because it looks like it's a pretty high watermark for him. Well, this is the point, Carol. When people compare Trump with Hitler, Trump is doing a lot better than Hitler ever did. And he's doing this in a democracy. So I don't fault Trump for what's happening. You have to fault the electorate, the voters. I mean, he's not hiding anything. And we're seeing what we're getting. And he's still getting polling numbers like this.

So let me ask you last question. If you were looking at that, what would you say to voters if you wanted to warn them or not warn them and say, because it could go a different way, right? You never, you didn't, nobody knew what Hitler was going to do, although he said he was going to do it. He absolutely did. Everyone said, no, he's not going to do what he says he's going to do. I always think people are going to do what they say they're going to do. What would you say to the American voter right now, using your book as an example? Well, I would say, and I cut it off the day Hitler was appointed chancellor, we know everything that happened there. I would say, know everything that happened there. I would say, you don't even have to read my book to see what happens, but if you read the book, you would be going, oh my God, there were so many alternatives that the Germans could have taken. I think for the voter, I'd say, take Trump at his word, and is this a country that you want to live in? Is this

what you want your country to become? Our 250th anniversary is in 2026. What kind of country do you want to be living in, in 2026? You know, just get out there and vote. You know, I have, like many people, I prefer a different Democratic candidate, but it is somebody who is upholding democracy. And even if you don't like it, it isn't between comparison between Trump and Biden. It's what kind of America do you want? Because at this point, it is critical. You're voting for the future of the country.

The lessons from my book would be it shows you, in fact, how perilous things were, what we ended up with, but I think it's the correct thing to end on. I really appreciate it, Tim. I think everybody should read this book. The comparisons are startling. At the same time, we do have alternatives, as they say. It's up to the voter to decide what kind of country they want to live in. Well, thank you, Cara. On with Cara Swisher is produced by Naeem Arraza, Castro-Rossell, Kateri Yochum, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Mary Mathis, Kate Gallagher, and Andrea Lopez-Cruzado. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already

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