MARCH BRINGS ADOLF HITLER
Last year, Timothy Reback published what we believe was the most timely book of the year — TAKEOVER: Hitler’s Final Rise To Power — a riveting account of how Adolph Hitler took power not by seizing it, as is commonly thought, but with the covert support and assistance of various financial, industrial and political leaders who tragically underestimated him…or simply, cravenly, joined him.
This year, on January 8, Mr. Ryback expanded upon TAKEOVER in a terrifyingly pertinent article for The Atlantic magazine, titled: “HOW HITLER DISMANTLED A DEMOCRACY IN 53 DAYS: He Used the Constitution to Shatter the Constitution.”
“On Monday morning, January 30, 1933,” Mr. Ryback wrote, “Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means.”
Hitler’s National Socialist party were far from a majority in 1933; their seats in Germany’s House of Parliament, the Reichstag, amounted to only 37 percent. Hitler, however, “believed that an Ermächtigungsgesetz (’empowering law’) dismantling the separation of powers, would grant Hitler’s executive branch the authority to make laws without parliamentary approval, and allow Hitler to rule by decree, bypassing democratic institutions and the constitution.”
Hitler had campaigned “on the promise of draining the ‘parliamentarian swamp — den parlamentarischen Sumpf ‘ — only to find himself,” as Mr. Ryback notes, “banging up against constitutional guardrails. He responded as he invariably did when confronted with dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths: He ignored them and doubled down.”
On February 27, 1933, shortly before 9 p.m., the Reichstag, erupted in flames. On Sunday morning, March 5, 1933, one week after the Reichstag fire, more than 40 million Germans went to the polls; 2 million more than in any previous election. Most of those 2 million new votes went to the Nazis. “‘No stranger election has perhaps ever been held in a civilized country,'” wrote New York Times reporter Frederick Birchall, “expressing his dismay at the apparent willingness of Germans to submit to authoritarian rule when they had the opportunity for a democratic alternative.”
On Thursday, March 23, 1933, the newly-elected Reichstag delegates assembled in the Kroll Opera House, opposite the ruins of the Reichstag. The following Monday, “the traditional Reich eagle had been removed and replaced with an enormous Nazi eagle, dramatically backlit with wings spread wide and a swastika in its talons. Hitler, dressed now in a brown storm trooper uniform with a swastika armband, arrived to pitch his proposed enabling law, now formally titled the ‘Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich.’
‘Treason toward our nation and our people shall in the future be stamped out with ruthless barbarity,’ Hitler vowed.
“Seven years earlier,” Mr. Ryback concludes, “in 1926, after being elected to the Reichstag as one of the first 12 National Socialist delegates, Joseph Goebbels… had been surprised to discover that he and the 11 other men (including Hermann Göring)… were accorded free first-class train travel and subsidized meals, along with the capacity to disrupt, obstruct, and paralyze democratic structures and processes at will. ‘The big joke on democracy,’ he observed, ‘is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction.'”
We invite you to read TAKEOVER closely, sooner rather than later. We also recommend reading it in tandem with Churchill’s decisive 1938 pre-war speech compendium, ARMS AND THE COVENANT, especially Churchill’s initial response to Hitler’s 1933 ascent, delivered in a March 23, 1933 speech to Parliament:
“When we read about Germany, when we watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilized society to large numbers of individuals solely on the ground of race—when we see that occurring in one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in the world, one cannot help feeling glad that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet.”
Finally, read in ARMS AND THE COVENANT Churchill’s timeless House of Commons speech on October 5, 1938, denouncing the appeasement of a dictator, Adolph Hitler, by Neville Chamberlain at Munich:
“We have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou are weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless, by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”