Lessons Americans can take from "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich"
"History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce."
On the morning of Election Day 2024, I finally received the hold I’d placed months before on the 57-hour unabridged audiobook version of William Shirer’s 1960 historical classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich1. It did not feel like a great omen then; it felt much worse 24 hours later.
There’s an old internet cliche known as Godwin’s Law, which states: “As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person/s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi, increases.” There’s a corollary to this, which is that the first person to make a Nazi comparison loses the argument. There’s good reason for this corollary: it’s generally accepted that comparisons to Nazi Germany are a lazy form of argument, a sort of nuclear option that more subtle minds would steer clear of. “You bring up Nazis, you lose” is a great deterrent against internet bros who might otherwise be tempted to draw comparisons between their getting blocked by Jameela Jamil on Twitter and the passage of the Nuremberg Laws.
But if you wish to have clear eyes about America’s politics in 2025, you have to come to terms with being a loser2. Probably the most influential definition of fascism comes from Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” (available free here at the Anarchist Library), in which he lists the fourteen properties of fascist ideologies: The Trump movement easily ticks all fourteen boxes. Even Trump’s closest cronies recognize this: his former Chief-of-Staff John Kelly openly called Trump a fascist in the run-up to the 2024 election. Kelly cited Trump’s admiration for Hitler’s generals as his reasoning for the comment, but he could have gone for lower hanging fruit, such as the concentration camps Kelly himself was complicit in setting up.
The sad truth is that Americans have a lot they could learn from the rise of Hitler and his Third Reich. But The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is nearly 1300 pages, and you definitely don’t have the time to read it, so I did it for you. Here are a handful of lessons I took from the book.
Nazism thrived because of German hopelessness and despair.
World War I was a catastrophe for Germany. It toppled their Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, ending a dynasty that was hundreds of years old. 2 million German soldiers were killed in that war, which was about 13% of all the males of age for conscription when the war rolled around. Many of those that did return were permanently scarred — physically, emotionally, or mentally — from their experiences in that unprecedented meat grinder of a war.
Because most of the war had been locked in stalemate, most Germans were perplexed as to how they had so suddenly lost the war, and the Treaty of Versailles which ended the war exacted brutal reparations on Germany which hobbled the country’s economy. The humiliation of the loss curdled in German souls, who bought into conspiracy theories that they’d been “stabbed in the back” by traitorous Marxist or Jewish elements within their own government. In the immediate postwar era, there were dozens of right-wing nationalist groups in the country that were exploiting these feelings of humiliation and despair to swell their ranks. In the early 20s, the Nazis were relatively obscure, gaining publicity only after a failed coup, and then for a large time running mostly off of Hitler’s oratorical steam.
The true godsend for the Nazi was the Great Depression, which ballooned the numbers of those desperate for a change. By the time it rolled around, Hitler had already built a sizable and increasingly powerful cult around him, and they were well placed to leverage this despair into his seizure of power.
Historically, times of despair are when radical groups gain a lot of their support, and it does not seem to me that American progressives have learned this lesson at all: in both 2016 and 2024, I saw well-meaning Democrats trying to argue that things actually had gotten better under both Obama and Biden. While there may have been statistics or broad trends to support this, people generally know better than anyone else whether their lives have gotten worse over a period of time. “The GDP grew from 2012-2016? Great, didn’t stop my boss from outsourcing my job/my kid from getting hooked on legally prescribed oxycontin/our medical bills sending us into bankruptcy.”
There was a study in 20163 that found that the polling question that best predicted whether someone voted for a change candidate (Bernie or Trump) over an establishment (Hillary) was: “do you think the country is heading in the right direction?” Those who answered no voted for change candidates. For people who do not think things are going well, change is what’s important, and if they aren’t offered progressive change, they may be tempted towards fascist change.
Germany did not have strong democratic institutions to stop Hitler’s rise.
Part of the reason Hitler was able to take power of Germany as quickly as he did was that Germany did not have a strong tradition of democratic institutions that could check his ambitions. The Weimar Republic was Germany’s first real attempt at democracy, and it came into power on the heels of a humiliating defeat in World War I.
After the Russian Revolution in 1917, many people believed that Germany was the next country that would fall to Bolshevik-style communism in the global revolution, and for a bit there, this wasn’t only possible but even likely: right after the war, a worker’s uprising toppled the long-lived German Empire, and it briefly looked like the communists might take power before they were suppressed. On the right, particularly among the military caste, there was a hope that the armed forces would overthrow the nascent democracy and bring back the military dictatorship that had effectively run the country during the war. Because of this, and because of the reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, German democracy was a shaky proposition from the start.
This meant that democratic institutions had not had much time to get any sort of foothold in the German state before they came under attack, either by nationalist forces on the right or communist forces on the left. As such, when Hitler rose to power many Germans were a) relieved to leave the unstable democratic era behind and b) unbothered to find themselves back in a style of government that many of them had already lived under and hadn’t minded all that much.
This is a core difference between 1920s Germany and modern America, which does have strong democratic institutions and a robust civic society. This does not mean America isn’t at risk of falling into fascism, it’s just that the work of eroding American democracy is a significantly larger task for America’s fascists than it was for the Nazis.
A lot had to go wrong for Hitler to come to and stay in power.
Early on in Shirer’s narrative, he mentions that Hitler’s father, Alois, was born out of wedlock, and so was given his mother’s surname, Schicklgruber. Later in his life, Alois convinced authorities to grant him the name of the man who became his stepfather, thus becoming Alois Hitler. Hitler confided to a friend later that he felt great relief at this accident of fate, as he couldn’t imagine millions of fascists engaging in a “Heil Schicklgruber!” salute.
When people talk about the rise of Nazism and when it could’ve been stopped, they always look to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s failure to rein in Hitler at the Munich peace talks. It’s a good example — he could’ve been stopped then — but it’s just one of thousands of instances over the course of Hitler’s life where things broke in his favor, or when he was able to bully and bluster his way through a moment of chaos. Hitler was, if nothing else, extremely lucky up until the very end. The air of inevitability he gave to his rule was little more than propaganda.
In reality, history is the type of complex, chaotic system that is impossible to predict. There are just too many variables, too many things that could break one way or the other, for us to fall into hopeless complacency. Keep in mind that in 1988, the fall of the Soviet Union seemed impossible. Keep in mind that, in 2010, no one saw revolution coming in the Middle East. Things can change, and far quicker than you expect.
Hitler was honest about who he was from the start.
One of the most baffling aspects of the Third Reich is how many Germans refused to believe that Hitler was who he said he was. In Mein Kampf, he clearly laid out the plans for what would eventually become World War II and the Holocaust, and then he spent the next couple of decades doing exactly what he said he’d do. Many Germans — who liked how Hitler had made Germany great again after the humiliations of the first World War — simply refused to believe that he was serious about all of the stuff about exterminating the Jews or annexing Austria, Poland, and eventually Russia. If they had believed him from the start, it’s less likely so many millions of people would have implicated themselves in Hitler’s crimes.
Germany’s businessmen and military thought they could control the Nazi movement to their own ends.
Part of the reason Hitler rose to power was because he a) made the right noises to the right powerful people, and b) those people thought they could rein in his excesses. Early Nazism — which went by the full name of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party — was at least partly influenced by socialist ideas, and the Nazis attitude towards American and British-style capitalism was always fairly hostile. When Hitler took over the party, he shifted away from the socialism and towards antisemitism and anticommunism. The latter made him appealing to Germany’s masters of industry, who took advantage of the rise of Nazism to crush Germany’s troublesome and radicalized labor movement.
Germany’s military — which was easily the most powerful force in Germany and could’ve overthrown Hitler or the Weimar Government that preceded him at any given moment until the start of World War II, and some moments during it — similarly saw in Hitler a man who wanted to restore the military to its pre-war dominance, and while many of the top brass were suspicious of him, they were pleasantly surprised at his ability to get stuff done, and increasingly threw in their lot with him, believing they could curb his excesses when necessary.
Long story short — neither group curbed his excesses, and many of the opportunists who hitched their wagon to the Nazis were killed either by Hitler, the war, or the tribunals that followed it.
The Nazis exploited crises, and when there was no crisis, they manufactured one.
Part of Hitler’s political genius was in his ability to turn moments of chaos to his favor. The first instance of this was in his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, where he tried (and miserably failed) to overthrow the government. While this should have been his end, he successfully used the trial — which put him in the national spotlight for the first time — to make his case for Nazism, which ended up winning him a lot of supporters.
Later, it became part of the Nazi playbook when they were trying to take over a country or institution: either exploit moments of crisis for their gain, and when no crisis came, they’d create a crisis. The most obvious instance of this was the Reichstag Fire. Hitler despised the democratic Reichstag and always planned to do away with it, but when it took too long for his liking to dismantle, he had his cronies burn it down. They blamed the arson on communists, which gave them a convenient excuse to hand Hitler emergency powers and repress the opposition.
The Nazis would employ this tactic a dozen more times in their various annexations and invasions: they would cause an incident, blame it on insurrectionists, communists, or Jews, and then use it as a pretext to do what they’d always planned on doing anyway.
It’s a working method well known to modern capitalists, who have been using the “shock doctrine” — exploiting crises to expand privatization or to buy up land and resources — since at least the days of Nixon. Trump in particular is savvy at using wholly fabricated crises to his advantage (think of the “immigrants are eating dogs in Springfield” nonsense).
“First as a tragedy, then as a farce.”
In 1852, Karl Marx wrote an essay discussing the rise of Napoleon’s mediocre nephew Napoleon III to the head of the French government:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
There wasn’t a lot about Hitler that was particularly funny — the man’s persona was passionate, brutal, and seething with fury and hate. The second wave of fascists, neatly arriving 100 years after the first wave, are all complete clowns: Brazil’s Bolsonaro, while an absolute monster of a human being, once told his people that to solve the world’s environmental problems, they should merely poop less. A few years later, he had to be hospitalized because of an “intestinal blockage,” in which they removed the poop from his stomach through a tube that came out of his nose. Donald Trump was famously photographed staring directly at an eclipse in spite of constant warnings not to. Boris Johnson once got stuck on zipline during an absurd publicity stunt celebrating an Olympic gold medal.
For a long time, I took Donald Trump’s clownishness as a comfort — he was absurd, there was no way he could do the same damage as other fascists. But it’s now 8 years since he first took office, he’s about to take it again, people are still in concentration camps, Roe v. Wade has been repealed, “tradwifes” are a thing, and Los Angeles is completely on fire.
It seems obvious now that the reason modern fascists can get away with being fascists is because they are clowns. It takes the edge off of their monstrosity if they Tweet absolutely bonkers stuff like, “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.” So I will wrap up with a TL;DR:
If there are three points to take from this article, they are as follows:
Take the clowns seriously. They can do serious damage, even while being clowns.
Their power is far more precarious than you realize. What seems like an unstoppable movement could be toppled with the right push from the right direction.
People’s despair is real — political alternatives to fascism are going to be the ones that acknowledge that fact, and that view broad, systemic change as essential.
Fuck these Nazis. Take care of yourself and your community, and when you are ready and able, get to work.
I broadly really liked this book, but just as a warning to anyone who reads it: it is openly homophobic. Shirer includes the homosexuality of certain high-ranking Nazis on the list of what he finds abhorrent about them. It’s jarring when you come across it, and it is a major flaw in the work. It is still a worthwhile read in spite of that, though.
If you have a clear eyes and a full heart, it creates what’s known as the Coach Taylor Paradox, in which you both can’t and must lose.
This is a bad joke directed at an absurdly niche audience, but I spent a lot of time trying to make the CTP (or “Catch Taylor,” in one particularly obscure draft), and decided that footnotes was the best way to serve the three people who appreciate it without alienating the rest of audience.
I can’t for the life of me find the link to this study, which I long kept in my notes: I know it was discussed on Vox. I hope you will trust me enough to get the broad strokes correct. I will not be offended if you do not, and if anyone manages to find the study, I will happily link it in here.