A historian describes the lessons learned — and ignored — from Hitler’s rise to power

“It has been said that the Weimar Republic died twice,” Timothy Ryback writes. “It was murdered, and it committed suicide.”

In his new book, “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power,” we know who the murderer is. But Ryback also sets out to show how the Nazi leader came to power in a functioning democracy, enabled by rivals and fairweather allies who either underestimated him or thought they could “tame” him once he took office. 

Ryback focuses on a single year, 1932; in the July elections, Hitler’s party won a slim plurality but not a majority, and Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s president, refused to appoint him chancellor, or prime minister. The sitting chancellor, Franz von Papen, and his successor, Kurt von Schleicher, were confident they could coopt the extremists and absorb them into a more moderate coalition. Another central figure in Ryback’s book, the media magnate Alfred Hugenberg, boosted the Nazis in his vast newspaper chain in the naïve belief that Hitler would make Hugenberg’s own far-right beliefs seem mild in comparison. 

In the end, these pillars of the establishment proved too clever for their own good. Despite an improving economy and other developments that undercut his extreme nationalism, Hitler filled a vacuum when moderate-left Social Democrats and conservative Catholic Centrists couldn’t or wouldn’t form a coalition to oppose him. Even after a disastrous parliamentary election in November 1932, when the Nazis lost seats, Hitler watched as his rivals failed to coalesce around an alternative, and an aging Hindenburg reluctantly offered the chancellorship to the man he disdained. The rest is previously unimaginable tragedy.

“Hitler vowed to destroy democracy through the democratic process, and he did,” writes Ryback. “An act of state suicide is more complicated, especially when it involves a democratic republic with a full complement of constitutional protections — civil liberties, due process, press freedom, public referendum.”

Donald Trump doesn’t come up in “Takeover,” but readers of Ryback’s book have scoured it for comparisons to the Germany of the early 1930s and present-day America. “Peril awaits a leadership class willing to align itself with political extremists, seeking to counter forces which it perceives to be more unsavory,” Clare McHugh wrote in a review of Ryback’s book in Commentary. “The lessons to be gleaned from this are eternal.”

Trump is no Hitler, Ryback told me when I asked about those comparisons in a recent interview, but then he ticked off the ways the former and perhaps future president has disparaged the democratic institutions he had sworn to uphold. On the stump, Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, unleash the Department of Justice against his adversaries and remake the civil service in his image. Trump also refuses to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election should he lose, and ominously told Christian followers “you won’t have to vote any more” if he regains the presidency in November. 

Ryback, 70, is the cofounder and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, in The Hague. His previous books include “The Last Survivor,” about the Dachau concentration camp. He spoke to me from his home in France; we discussed the fragility of democracy, how Hitler might have been stopped, and what he said were “unsettling” similarities — and differences — between then and now. 

Our interview was edited for length and clarity.

Your book focuses on a narrow time frame, between the summer of 1932, when Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party ekes out a very narrow victory in the parliamentary elections but he isn’t given the chancellor’s seat, and January 1933, when Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s president, reluctantly appoints Hitler chancellor. Why did you choose that tight window?

The historian’s job is to explain how we got to where we got. I decided to look through the crucial election of July 1932, when the Nazis only won 37% of the vote but were the single largest political force in the country. I decided to forget everything we knew and started reading the daily newspapers, and just looked at what was happening on a day-by-day basis. Ultimately you realize how perilous Hitler’s political situation was and just how many contingencies came into play for him to assume power.  

Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw basically explained that Hitler had the luck of the devil.

What are some of those key contingencies, and what would have had to happen to stop Hitler in his tracks?

In the November 1932 election, a month before Hitler comes to power, his party lost 2 million votes over the previous election. They were hemorrhaging voters and membership and the party was essentially bankrupt. So politically, ideologically and financially, the Nazi movement was bankrupt. As a pundit said earlier, “Hitler is a man with a great future behind him.”

In the broader context, some of Hitler’s best talking points were actually being undermined. The Versailles Treaty, with its despised war guilt clause and reparations and its restrictions on the German army — well, all of these were being renegotiated. The German economy was beginning to recover. Had Kurt von Schleicher been able to remain chancellor for another six months, the Nazi movement would have been spent. 

What turns the tide there? Is it a lack of political courage on the part of his opponents? Is it some genius on Hitler’s part that turns loss into a victory?

If Hitler had any characteristic that ultimately led to his success, it was this blind determination to not let any political reality stand in his way. In some ways, it’s like Trump at his inauguration, when he could look at the mall and see all the empty spaces and still be able to say, “This is the largest crowd that’s ever been.” When Hitler ran against Hindenburg for the presidency in March 1932, and he lost by 6 million votes, he went to court to have the election results overturned, claiming election fraud and irregularities by state officials. The judge heard him out and said no. Then, when Hitler got 37% of the vote in the July election, he said, “Well, you know, 37% is 75% of 51%. So in a democracy, I have the majority of the simple majority and therefore I should be chancellor.”

He could take every event and exclude anything that would suggest defeat.

But he also had his enablers. Are there figures in government or the media who either out of self-interest, incompetence or overconfidence decided maybe they could make a deal with the devil?

Hitler was this backwoods Austrian who was suddenly functioning in these elite and elitist circles, and I think people like [the former Chancellor] Franz von Papen and Schleicher thought they could play him. They did have power on their side and felt like they could manipulate him to their own purposes. They underestimated him.

Your book invites all sorts of comparisons to America’s political situation today: a gridlocked legislature, a populist right-wing candidate, rising nationalism, economic anxiety and an unpopular incumbent. I don’t want to push such comparisons but I’m just going to ask about a few of them. In President Hindenburg you have a once popular but aging leader — the way Joe Biden was popular enough to get elected, but nearly four years later was seen by many in his party and in polls as not up to the job of confronting his opponent. Was Hindenburg the wrong person at the wrong time to rein in all these divisions and block Hitler?

I am happy to enumerate the comparisons because there are some truly frightening ones.

But I came to admire Hindenburg, a great war hero and old, old man who came out of retirement and agreed to become president. He followed the constitution to the letter. He disdained Hitler for multiple reasons, but mainly because he was such a divisive figure. Hindenburg was looking for someone to unite a country that was polarized. And then on top of that was Hitler’s antisemitism. Hindenburg told Hitler to his face, “I could never have someone as chancellor who spews the kind of hatred that you do.”

So when you watch Hindenburg throughout his presidency, you see him basically trying to steer a conservative but institutional course and to keep the republic afloat.

He made a misstep on the day he appointed Hitler chancellor. I think he was just worn down. There were no other candidates that seemed viable, and he was assured that Hitler would be kept under control. But I don’t understand why he let things go as far as they did.

The media climate in Weimar Germany also seems to have some unhealthy parallels with today. Talk about the media mogul who boosted Hitler’s reputation despite his own misgivings about the Nazi platform, and created an atmosphere of chaos and what we might call alternative facts. 

Alfred Hugenberg led a radical, right-wing segment of a German nationalist party. They only had about 40 seats, but they were crucial to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. He ran a network of 1,600 newspapers.

Hugenberg was also an enemy of democracy, but he had a strategy he called “the politics of catastrophe.” His strategy was to fill the public space with such divisive issues that you had to come out on one side or the other. In particular was the Treaty of Versailles [ending World War I]: Hugenberg put forward a referendum which went up for public vote to abrogate the treaty, saying that any signatory to the Treaty of Versailles or any government official who had been involved in implementing its provisions would be considered treasonous and would be executed. You had to come down on one side or the other of this issue, and these are I think what we in politics nowadays called wedge issues. 

You are either for it or against it — no nuance, no trying to reach a compromise or find common ground.

Right. He also flooded the public space with outright lies — for example, that the German government was enslaving German teenagers in order to pay off the reparation debts. It’s a complete invention.

Hugenberg really understood the nature of democracy, in that it relies on consensus and coalition building, especially in the parliamentary systems, and the way you destroy it is to hollow out the center. You’ll get these wedge issues in there and any kind of nuance falls away.

But in the end, he created a monster in Hitler he couldn’t control.

He would never stand up to Hitler, even when he would confront him on every single issue. Had he walked, Hitler’s chancellorship would have been over before it began.

When you talk about some of the “truly frightening” comparisons between then and now, what else comes to mind?

Back in the late 1980s, I taught a course on Weimar and Nazi culture at Harvard. I used to draw comparisons and say, look, Weimar Republic only had 13 years as a democracy, while America had 200-plus years of democratic experience, so let’s not be too harsh on Weimar.

For a democratic republic equipped with all the constitutional protections to self-destruct was a two way-dance. The resonances with the United States that are most unsettling is that Trump has made clear what his attitude is toward liberal democracy. What’s deeply unsettling to me is that Hitler, in an open and free election, the most he ever got was 37% of the vote. In America, in a free and open society, Trump is tottering around with 50-51%.  

I’d also say the gridlock that we’re seeing in Congress: When Joseph Goebbels [the Nazi party’s chief propagandist] first became a delegate, he says to the Reichstag, “Don’t think we come as friends or neutrals. We come as deadly enemies, mortal enemies.” He said, “The big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.” And I think when I’ve seen sort of the self-serving nature of Congress, and the intentional gridlocks just for political purposes, it is rather disheartening.

Trump is not Hitler, by any means. But I think there are modalities that are very similar. Think of the nature of his rallies. When you see Hitler at the Nuremberg rallies, after he’s chancellor, we see him as a fanatic. But what you also miss is the amount of humor that he injected into his speeches. And there was an article in Politico a couple of months ago, in which they said, “Don’t underestimate the power of humor with Trump.” Hitler was constantly making jokes and poking fun, also putting labels on people that kind of stick with them.

And then you see both using a couple of tropes over and over again. With Hitler it was “the purity of the blood” of Germans; with Trump, in regard to immigration, he spoke of immigrants “poisoning the blood of the country.”

On the flip side, in what way are the Hitler-Trump comparisons overblown? And maybe what I’m asking is, aren’t there mechanisms in the United States, checks and balances, that are more robust than anything we saw in Weimar Germany?

I would never equate Trump with Hitler. Hitler is a singular figure. It’s irresponsible to do so as a historian. But there are troubling similarities and parallels that I think are part of an authoritarian bent and personality.

Part of what I tried to do in the book is to show that, first of all, Hitler was not inevitable. He was not some larger-than-life figure. He was this scrappy politician who waffled on issues, who made bad decisions and almost failed, and had he not gotten the chancellorship, that too would have been seen as inevitable. I promise you, a week after the November elections every pundit is going to be explaining why its outcome was inevitable. I don’t know what’s going to happen on the next day, and none of us do.

The parallels between Trump and Hitler that I think are fair, in addition to parallel quotes and strategy, is noting how both come out endorsing people that many of us would view as reprehensible. After a group of Nazis literally beat to death an immigrant Polish laborer and were sentenced to death, Hitler came out saying, “When I am chancellor, I would never put a foreigner’s life above that of a blood German.”

Hitler also said, “If I’m appointed chancellor, heads will roll.” Trump also talks about revenge and that he’ll use the instruments of government to seek retribution on his political opponents. Well, that’s a pretty scary thing, and it’s not the way you think of a functioning democracy. 

And then there is the coarsening of rhetoric. It’s not that antisemitism didn’t exist in Germany before Hitler, but he brought it forth in a way that you were able to discuss it in polite company. In the United States, things get said that were just unthinkable 20 or 30 years ago, and in many ways, you can trace that back to Mr. Trump.

What would you say to American voters who might read your book as a cautionary tale and who don’t want to repeat the mistakes that might undermine democracy?

Get out there and vote, and vote for someone you believe will uphold the democratic system. This election coming up is a make-or-break moment for Trump, and if he doesn’t win, I also think the movement gathered around him will begin to dissipate. You saw that with Hitler. I’m not saying the National Socialist Movement wouldn’t have existed, but they probably would have continued to lose numbers, the economy would have continued to strengthen, the political establishment would have been there, had Hindenburg let the system stay in place for another six months, because Hitler came at the only moment when it was possible for him to have done so.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.