A Day after Hitler Came to Power

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By E.A. Heaman

It’s American election time again and, once again, everyone has an opinion on whether this is just another election or whether rule of law is seriously under threat. Donald Trump has said that he needs only one day of dictatorship, only one hour of summary violence, to quell all unreasonable resistance, leaving only the reasonable. Can we test such claims against experience and evidence? It behooves the historians, if no one else, to scour the archives for answers. 

Some historians point to Nazi Germany circa 1933 as the obvious rejoinder. When the public empowered politicians who promised dictatorial and violent solutions to social and economic tensions, the dissolution of the Reichstag and Kristallnacht followed. But the comparison fails without deeper causes and consequences: the circumstances leading up to the Nazi seizure of power and the circumstances that finally restored democracy and rule of law. When peace came, at the end of the Second World War, it was built on the ashes of Nazi Germany but also on the firm conviction that the Second World War must not end as the First World War did: with a Carthaginian peace and American isolationism.

John Maynard Keynes called the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 a “Carthaginian peace” because it took the lessons of economics and applied them in reverse, to impose lasting economic injury to Germany. For Keynes, it obstructed not just Germany’s but also Europe’s economic recovery. It enabled the Nazi seizure of power, repudiation of Germany’s payments (with American conniving), and the remilitarization of Germany.[1]

American economists also came to believe that the American diplomatic turn to isolation and economic turn to protection had generalized “beggar-my-neighbour” policies that provoked depression and renewed war. They greeted the outbreak of the Second World War with a remarkable degree of history-mindedness. The mistakes made at the end of the First World War must not be repeated at the end of the Second. Long before the United States entered the war, American economists threw themselves into postwar reconstruction, believing they must prepare the American public for a new internationalism and largesse. Economists at the U.S. State Department proliferated, producing their own analyses and circulating interesting writings amongst a select readership, including consultant experts and statesmen. The scale and urgency of their writings intensified during the war, especially as the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr., began to advocate a more-than-Carthaginian peace that would strip Germany of all its industrial capacity.

In 1945, Jacob Viner, a Montreal-born economist at the University of Chicago, served as a consultant to both the Treasury and the State Department, and his mailbox swelled with forwarded economic memos and analyses. In his papers at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton, I found one that seems to me, as it seemed to the State Department economists, worthy of circulation. “What to do with Germany?” was delivered to the Commonwealth Club of California in June 1945 and also broadcast over the radio.[2] Its author, Karl Brandt, was an agricultural economist and a refugee from Nazi Germany who began, as many did, at the “University in Exile” (the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research), and then moved to Stanford. Brandt made a powerful argument that the State Department heeded but that historians have largely overlooked. In Brandt’s advice on restoring democracy and repudiating tyranny, I see a chillingly apt warning for the voters of November 2024.

Brandt had both economic and moral arguments against policies that would condemn millions of Germans to starvation or enslavement. He agreed that there must be penalties, including movements of people and goods, but European and world recovery needed, he argued, Germany industry and industriousness. Economic and moral logic alike militated against the harshest plans to punish Germany that would force “the German people down to a diet and a standard of living lower than that of the poorest victimized nation, and keeping them in that sort of perpetual concentration camp. The cruel tragi-comedy is that these people believe this is the way to secure the peace.” The credit for victory went to America, and the shaping of the peace must reflect American policy and opinion, but America was in danger of being brutalized by “the brutality of a cruel enemy.” Brandt argued: “I am not primarily concerned with the political effects in Germany, but rather with the immeasurable harm it will do to the restoration of moral principles with which the reconstruction of a world of law and order must stand or fall.”

Brandt drew on American evidence for his most essential point: a report by Justice Robert H. Jackson to President Roosevelt which argued that the Germans were not universally complicit in the Nazi crimes. Jackson observed that most Germans viewed “the Nazis as a band of brigands, set on subverting within Germany every vestige of a rule of law which would entitle an aggregation of people to be looked upon collectively as a member of the family of nations.” The wider world had shared in the outrage and in the knowledge, very well aware, Brandt added, that “the first victims of Nazi atrocities and acts of sadism and brutality were Germans.” Britain had kept such things as torture and murder in Buchenwald quiet during “the years of appeasement.” But Americans too had known and done nothing. And America itself was not so very different from Germany and not so very immune to the dangers.

Ever since March 1933 our government in Washington has been entirely aware of the wholesale torture of the peaceful Germans. From 1939 through the spring of 1945, the torture and liquidation of Germans in camps was only increased in scope, and the system perfected in the years before 1939 was merely applied as well to other people.

All Germans knew about it. I did, a few days after it began. Two of my own farm laborers were among the first inmates of the camp at Oranienburg, just a few miles from my farm. Why did I not do anything about it? For the simple reason that soon I was completely paralyzed by fright and terror, as I am sure every one of you would have been. A day after Hitler came to power, terror was in effect. You had a choice then, between being quiet or being silenced in torture camps. I had voted against Hitler, and I was well known to be an anti-Nazi. I plotted with good and solid friends, many of whom paid with their lives, kicked and beaten to bloody pulp by the same type of criminal we execute here for murder, but who, there, went into uniform. Up to this day I have not found in the United States a single person who could tell me specifically what I or any other German should have done to stop the Gestapo, SA, or SS, from torturing people to death.

I saw very clearly that I would land and end very quickly in a camp. However, being a coward and no hero, and clinging to this little bit of life for myself and my wife, I chose to leave everything behind, and came to these shores where I had many good friends. But millions of the best Germans neither had the opportunity to emigrate, nor did they want to give up what they loved. My fullest sympathy and my deep respect is with them. Through no fault of their own they have lost their beloved ones, their possessions, their honor, and their country.

In twelve happy years of my second life in America, I have grown very fond of the many excellent qualities of our people, but I have not been able to convince myself that American men and women are made of essentially different timber than the good Germans I have known. I am convinced that under the same system of terror by a well organized, omnipresent, and brutal secret police, they would be just as hopelessly trapped as the good Germans were.

In fact, I know that they have been, where sectional reigns of terror have allowed gang warfare to take away civil rights, and men to be tortured and murdered who dared to speak out, regardless of the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. These sectional reigns of terror were brought to a halt only because the brigands did not capture the whole government, as they did in Germany.

Brandt’s “a day after Hitler came to power” resonates down to the present as a warning against allowing “gangsters” a single day of national dictatorship or a single hour of organized violence. If Hitler had no incentive to restore democracy and rule of law on day two, it’s hard to see how Trump would be any different.

Everywhere they went, the Nazis found willing collaborators—people, we might say, who hated freedoms for fellow citizens more than they hated gangster rule. So too they would have found them in Americans, Brandt argued, who unknowingly quoted Hitler or loudly spouted “anti-semitic venom” on a train. Collaborators thought they were getting more freedom but, on discovering the error, had scant incentive to recant for fear of a beating or a conviction. All the more important that those who had “never compromised with the gangsters who have drenched Europe in blood” speak out and rebuild multi-party politics, with the “left wing, center, and right, in so far as these groups believe in constitutional government by law.” Brandt urged: “Freedom of speech means something only so long as we have the intellectual integrity and the civil courage to speak when the time calls for it.” But even integrity and courage are nothing without a measure of history-mindedness.

E.A. Heaman teaches history at McGill University.


[1] Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (Viking, 2006), 7.

[2] Karl Brandt, “What to do with Germany?” in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University, MC 138, Jacob Viner Papers, Box 45, folder 5. All Brandt quotations in this post are excerpted from this document.

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