In the face of renewed threats to democracy, historical knowledge of past dictatorships becomes as important as ever. After all, the Holocaust and World War II show what can happen when democracies allow themselves to be undermined from within.
DUBLIN – In the spring of 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor, Thomas Mann was on holiday in Switzerland with his wife. While there, the Nobel laureate author received a warning from Germany that it would be unsafe for him to return. Now that the Nazis were in power, they wanted to send Mann to a concentration camp for having publicly opposed them.
Mann thus became one of the first German refugees from Hitler’s regime. Until 1938, he spent most of his time in Switzerland. But as Hitler’s power increased and war in Europe looked increasingly likely, he moved to the United States, where he did not stay silent. Even at the height of Hitler’s conquests in Europe, Mann remained doggedly optimistic, promising Americans that “democracy will win” in the end.
Will it, though? Many nowadays are not so sure. As authors like Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University remind us, we are living in a new age of the “strongman,” with democracy retreating in many parts of the world. Hate-inspired violence is becoming more common on both sides of the Atlantic, and things that were once unthinkable have become normalized. This November, in the country where Mann once promised that democracy would prevail, tens of millions of Americans will vote for a candidate who responded to losing the 2020 election by instigating a fascist-style assault on the US Capitol.
The Past as Prologue
Given the need to defend democracy, historical knowledge has become more important than ever. Fortunately, in the lead-up to this year’s US election, historians Richard J. Evans and Timothy W. Ryback have each published books that mine the past to offer guidelines for navigating our increasingly concerning present.
Evans, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, is the more distinguished of the two authors. A prolific historian, he first came to public prominence in the early 2000s for his role as an expert witness in a libel case brought by the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving against Penguin Books and the historian Deborah Lipstadt. Evans played a key role in the trial, clashing with Irving in courtroom scenes that were later dramatized in the 2016 film Denial.
Up until then, Evans’s major works had largely focused on nineteenth-century Germany; but following the case, he moved forward in time to write a critically acclaimed three-volume social and political history of Nazi Germany, published between 2003 and 2008. Alongside Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, which focuses on the life of the dictator, Evans’s trilogy remains among the most important general works on Nazi Germany.
By contrast, Ryback, an American historian who serves as director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, has never written a general history of Nazism. He is best known for his 2008 best-seller, Hitler’s Private Library, a cleverly conceived study in which the dictator responsible for the “industrial production of corpses” (to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase) is also revealed to have been a book lover and an avid reader. Then came Ryback’s 2014 book, Hitler’s First Victims, which offered a forensic account of the SS’s first excesses of violence in the concentration camp at Dachau (where the Nazis wanted to send Mann) in 1933.
Fateful Decisions
For all their differences, Evans and Ryback both see German history as a powerful lens through which to view the problems currently facing liberal democracy. Thus, Evans sees the fall of the Weimar Republic as “the paradigm of democracy’s collapse and dictatorship’s triumph,” and Ryback begins his book Takeover in early August 1932, just days after the Nazis reached their electoral high point.
Following a summer of violent street fighting between Nazi Brownshirts and Communists, Hitler’s party won 37% of the vote and 230 seats in the Reichstag in the election on July 31, 1932. The magnitude of the Nazis’ triumph led Hitler to assume that he was entitled to the position of chancellor. But German President Paul von Hindenburg, whose office was supposed to serve as a guardian of the constitution, disagreed.
At a meeting on August 13, 1932, Hindenburg snubbed Hitler and used emergency powers available to him under the Weimar constitution to support the chancellorship of arch-conservative Franz von Papen, the leader of the cabinet that Hindenburg had appointed on June 1, 1932. Papen’s government was entirely dependent on Hindenburg’s support and lacked an electoral mandate of any kind. It was so stacked with aristocratic conservatives that it was known as the “cabinet of barons.”
In late summer 1932, shocking scenes played out in the briefly reconvened German parliament. Reichstag President Hermann Göring, who had received the position in August thanks to the votes of his fellow Nazi Party members, abused the position to humiliate Papen by ignoring him in the Chamber before the Nazis and Communists joined forces to vote through a no-confidence motion in Papen’s government. Hindenburg then called yet another election for that November. But when this failed to produce a workable parliamentary majority, he changed his mind about who should be chancellor, this time appointing General Kurt von Schleicher. Like Papen, Schleicher lacked an electoral mandate, but he did have the support of the army and business.
Schleicher’s cabinet lasted for just eight weeks. Angry about being dismissed, Papen conspired against the new chancellor and sought Hitler’s support for a new government. When Schleicher demanded more support from Hindenburg in the final days of January 1933, the aging president decided to push him to the side.
On January 30, 1933, with Papen’s encouragement, Hindenburg appointed Hitler, who had served as a corporal when Hindenburg was field marshal. The new chancellor would head a coalition government surrounded by “respectable” conservatives led by Papen. The latter believed that he had “boxed” Hitler in, and that he would be able to control and manipulate the new chancellor to force through his own conservative agenda.
Contingencies and Counterfactuals
Ryback offers a blow-by-blow account of the intrigues and scheming that occurred during the 170 days between Hindenburg and Hitler’s meeting on August 13, 1932, and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. The figures who feature most prominently include Hitler and his inner circle; his Nazi Party rival Gregor Strasser; his rivals for the chancellery, Papen and Schleicher; the conservative politician and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg; and the aging but fully lucid Hindenburg. Ryback’s narrative mixes their voices in with those of contemporary newspapers, including a large selection of quotations from the New York Times’s Berlin correspondent, as well as illustrative observations from well-known diarists like Harry Graf von Kessler.
Written with verve and close attention to detail, Takeover will be a successful book. But is it a good one? Ryback succeeds in capturing the hectic nature of events and the intrigues and scheming that continuously shifted the key players’ positions and prospects. He also offers a powerful historical message: while Nazism was once explained as the product of centuries of German history, the truth is that the story could have turned in another direction right up until the final minutes before Hitler became chancellor. Even on the morning of January 30, 1933, there was a last-gasp debate about whether to back out and abandon the envisaged coalition. There is human agency at every moment in history.
But this point, however well delivered, isn’t really new. The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy, published in 2018, is just as much of a page-turner, and it includes a closer examination of why things happened as they did, making it a superior book. Takeover, by contrast, includes hardly any analysis of the Germans who opposed Nazism during the winter of 1932-33. The speeches that ultimately forced Mann to flee the country are not included in Ryback’s story, nor is the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. All we get are a few passing quotes from a Social Democratic newspaper.
This is a glaring omission. In March 1933, just minutes before the passage of the Nazi’s Enabling Act (the legal starting point of the dictatorship), the Social Democratic politician Otto Wels addressed the Reichstag and bravely defended “humanity” and democracy as “eternal” values that would outlive Nazism. As he spoke, he had a suicide pill in his pocket, fearing that he might be arrested and handed over to Nazi torturers immediately afterwards.
Takeover tells us nothing about this scene or the man at its center. This is not only because Ryback ends his book on January 30, 1933, thus leaving out the process by which the dictatorship was created (for that, readers should turn to Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days). More fundamentally, it is because the choices facing those who fought Nazism do not feature in Ryback’s story. Yet as recent events in the Democratic Party have shown, those who oppose populists do have choices, and they can use them to re-energize the defense of democracy.
The Hitler Circle
Evans also says little about the Germans who opposed Nazism, though he does discuss Wels when providing context for Hitler’s establishment of a dictatorship. Hitler’s People is a collection of 24 biographies, each of which tells us something important about who the Nazis were and how the regime worked. Evans starts with Hitler and spends 100 pages providing a short but comprehensive biography of the one-time nobody who became the leader of the Third Reich.
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The next section includes chapters on Hitler’s inner circle, whose personal proximity to the leader gave them unique positions within the overall history of the Nazi regime. Among these “paladins,” as Evans calls them, are familiar names such as Göring, the former fighter pilot who rose to become the “second man” in the Third Reich; Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the secret police and the driving force behind the implementation of the Holocaust; and Joseph Goebbels, the regime’s top propagandist.
Evans next focuses on those just outside the inner circle, such as Julius Streicher, Nazi Germany’s most notorious antisemitic propagandist and a key figure in the Holocaust, as well as Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Hans Frank, all of whom bore direct responsibility for the murder of millions of people.
These shorter biographical profiles are all important and well worth reading, but even more disturbing is a third cluster that Evans calls “The Instruments”: the people through whom the top officials carried out their vision of a Nazified world order. Of the nine biographies in this section, the only name many readers will recognize is Leni Riefenstahl. After 1945, the director of Triumph of the Will, the most important propaganda film made about Hitler during the Third Reich, presented herself to the world as an apolitical non-Nazi and got away with it.
The other “instruments” need to be better known, especially in the context of our current politics. They include the generals who ignored the international laws of war; the men and women who ran concentration camps and shot and tortured prisoners for fun; the doctors who killed sick children; and the women who cheered the regime and never apologized or felt remorse for its crimes. For example, Evans’s last chapter focuses on Luise Solmitz, a middle-class woman who fell for Hitler’s promise to return Germany to greatness, even though her own husband was classified as Jewish under Nazi law (he was a conservative nationalist, a veteran, and a Christian convert, but his mother was Jewish).
Hitler’s People is an excellent book, because it shows us who the Nazis really were: upper-class and middle-class Germans who faced downward social mobility, feared equality and social progress, and took out their frustrations over Germany’s defeat in World War I on those least responsible for it, Jews and Social Democrats. From the earliest days of the Nazi movement, they supported or fully tolerated its violence. Even after Hitler launched a genocidal war across Europe, they continued to cheer for him. And most of those who survived Nazism’s final defeat were unrepentant for the rest of their days.
Every reader of Evans’s book will encounter a few figures who stick in his or her mind. For some, it will be Goebbels, who has become the template for those who seek to manipulate public opinion and undermine democracy. For others, it will be the architect Albert Speer, whose successful myth-making autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, led many to believe that he was “the good Nazi.” Fortunately, Evans debunks such unhistorical nonsense.
The Past Is Never Dead
For me, the most striking chapter is on Karl Brandt, a doctor who drew on his medical knowledge to become a mass murderer in the service of the regime. No one forced him into it. He could have lived a prosperous life without becoming a Nazi, but he chose not to.
Brandt was a product of the German university system, and my only disappointment with Hitler’s People is that its subjects do not include any of the university presidents who oversaw the academic world that helped transform students of medicine into mass murderers. Many of these men would remain respected figures in their fields long after 1945. They do not deserve to have their complicity in the Nazi-era horrors so conveniently forgotten.
Evans writes with the wisdom and anger of a scholar who has spent a lifetime using history to make political points. He disdains the descendants of General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who still live on an estate that was a gift from Hitler. His chapter on Papen, who was released from prison in 1949 and lived until 1969, offers a searingly insightful look at political collaboration with evil. And he is no less appalled by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Nazi women’s organization who remained unrepentant until her death in 1999.
Reading Hitler’s People, one cannot help but recognize the parallels to those who are complicit in, or openly profiting from, undermining democracy today. We should all share Evans’s anger. History has already shown us what happens when democracies allow their enemies to weaken them from within. Though we face an onslaught of manipulative propaganda and technologically augmented lies, there is still time to prove Mann right.
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DUBLIN – In the spring of 1933, following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as German chancellor, Thomas Mann was on holiday in Switzerland with his wife. While there, the Nobel laureate author received a warning from Germany that it would be unsafe for him to return. Now that the Nazis were in power, they wanted to send Mann to a concentration camp for having publicly opposed them.
Mann thus became one of the first German refugees from Hitler’s regime. Until 1938, he spent most of his time in Switzerland. But as Hitler’s power increased and war in Europe looked increasingly likely, he moved to the United States, where he did not stay silent. Even at the height of Hitler’s conquests in Europe, Mann remained doggedly optimistic, promising Americans that “democracy will win” in the end.
Will it, though? Many nowadays are not so sure. As authors like Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University remind us, we are living in a new age of the “strongman,” with democracy retreating in many parts of the world. Hate-inspired violence is becoming more common on both sides of the Atlantic, and things that were once unthinkable have become normalized. This November, in the country where Mann once promised that democracy would prevail, tens of millions of Americans will vote for a candidate who responded to losing the 2020 election by instigating a fascist-style assault on the US Capitol.
The Past as Prologue
Given the need to defend democracy, historical knowledge has become more important than ever. Fortunately, in the lead-up to this year’s US election, historians Richard J. Evans and Timothy W. Ryback have each published books that mine the past to offer guidelines for navigating our increasingly concerning present.
Evans, an emeritus professor at the University of Cambridge, is the more distinguished of the two authors. A prolific historian, he first came to public prominence in the early 2000s for his role as an expert witness in a libel case brought by the notorious Holocaust denier David Irving against Penguin Books and the historian Deborah Lipstadt. Evans played a key role in the trial, clashing with Irving in courtroom scenes that were later dramatized in the 2016 film Denial.
Up until then, Evans’s major works had largely focused on nineteenth-century Germany; but following the case, he moved forward in time to write a critically acclaimed three-volume social and political history of Nazi Germany, published between 2003 and 2008. Alongside Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, which focuses on the life of the dictator, Evans’s trilogy remains among the most important general works on Nazi Germany.
By contrast, Ryback, an American historian who serves as director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, has never written a general history of Nazism. He is best known for his 2008 best-seller, Hitler’s Private Library, a cleverly conceived study in which the dictator responsible for the “industrial production of corpses” (to borrow Hannah Arendt’s phrase) is also revealed to have been a book lover and an avid reader. Then came Ryback’s 2014 book, Hitler’s First Victims, which offered a forensic account of the SS’s first excesses of violence in the concentration camp at Dachau (where the Nazis wanted to send Mann) in 1933.
Fateful Decisions
For all their differences, Evans and Ryback both see German history as a powerful lens through which to view the problems currently facing liberal democracy. Thus, Evans sees the fall of the Weimar Republic as “the paradigm of democracy’s collapse and dictatorship’s triumph,” and Ryback begins his book Takeover in early August 1932, just days after the Nazis reached their electoral high point.
Following a summer of violent street fighting between Nazi Brownshirts and Communists, Hitler’s party won 37% of the vote and 230 seats in the Reichstag in the election on July 31, 1932. The magnitude of the Nazis’ triumph led Hitler to assume that he was entitled to the position of chancellor. But German President Paul von Hindenburg, whose office was supposed to serve as a guardian of the constitution, disagreed.
At a meeting on August 13, 1932, Hindenburg snubbed Hitler and used emergency powers available to him under the Weimar constitution to support the chancellorship of arch-conservative Franz von Papen, the leader of the cabinet that Hindenburg had appointed on June 1, 1932. Papen’s government was entirely dependent on Hindenburg’s support and lacked an electoral mandate of any kind. It was so stacked with aristocratic conservatives that it was known as the “cabinet of barons.”
In late summer 1932, shocking scenes played out in the briefly reconvened German parliament. Reichstag President Hermann Göring, who had received the position in August thanks to the votes of his fellow Nazi Party members, abused the position to humiliate Papen by ignoring him in the Chamber before the Nazis and Communists joined forces to vote through a no-confidence motion in Papen’s government. Hindenburg then called yet another election for that November. But when this failed to produce a workable parliamentary majority, he changed his mind about who should be chancellor, this time appointing General Kurt von Schleicher. Like Papen, Schleicher lacked an electoral mandate, but he did have the support of the army and business.
Schleicher’s cabinet lasted for just eight weeks. Angry about being dismissed, Papen conspired against the new chancellor and sought Hitler’s support for a new government. When Schleicher demanded more support from Hindenburg in the final days of January 1933, the aging president decided to push him to the side.
On January 30, 1933, with Papen’s encouragement, Hindenburg appointed Hitler, who had served as a corporal when Hindenburg was field marshal. The new chancellor would head a coalition government surrounded by “respectable” conservatives led by Papen. The latter believed that he had “boxed” Hitler in, and that he would be able to control and manipulate the new chancellor to force through his own conservative agenda.
Contingencies and Counterfactuals
Ryback offers a blow-by-blow account of the intrigues and scheming that occurred during the 170 days between Hindenburg and Hitler’s meeting on August 13, 1932, and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. The figures who feature most prominently include Hitler and his inner circle; his Nazi Party rival Gregor Strasser; his rivals for the chancellery, Papen and Schleicher; the conservative politician and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg; and the aging but fully lucid Hindenburg. Ryback’s narrative mixes their voices in with those of contemporary newspapers, including a large selection of quotations from the New York Times’s Berlin correspondent, as well as illustrative observations from well-known diarists like Harry Graf von Kessler.
Written with verve and close attention to detail, Takeover will be a successful book. But is it a good one? Ryback succeeds in capturing the hectic nature of events and the intrigues and scheming that continuously shifted the key players’ positions and prospects. He also offers a powerful historical message: while Nazism was once explained as the product of centuries of German history, the truth is that the story could have turned in another direction right up until the final minutes before Hitler became chancellor. Even on the morning of January 30, 1933, there was a last-gasp debate about whether to back out and abandon the envisaged coalition. There is human agency at every moment in history.
But this point, however well delivered, isn’t really new. The American historian Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy, published in 2018, is just as much of a page-turner, and it includes a closer examination of why things happened as they did, making it a superior book. Takeover, by contrast, includes hardly any analysis of the Germans who opposed Nazism during the winter of 1932-33. The speeches that ultimately forced Mann to flee the country are not included in Ryback’s story, nor is the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. All we get are a few passing quotes from a Social Democratic newspaper.
This is a glaring omission. In March 1933, just minutes before the passage of the Nazi’s Enabling Act (the legal starting point of the dictatorship), the Social Democratic politician Otto Wels addressed the Reichstag and bravely defended “humanity” and democracy as “eternal” values that would outlive Nazism. As he spoke, he had a suicide pill in his pocket, fearing that he might be arrested and handed over to Nazi torturers immediately afterwards.
Takeover tells us nothing about this scene or the man at its center. This is not only because Ryback ends his book on January 30, 1933, thus leaving out the process by which the dictatorship was created (for that, readers should turn to Peter Fritzsche’s Hitler’s First Hundred Days). More fundamentally, it is because the choices facing those who fought Nazism do not feature in Ryback’s story. Yet as recent events in the Democratic Party have shown, those who oppose populists do have choices, and they can use them to re-energize the defense of democracy.
The Hitler Circle
Evans also says little about the Germans who opposed Nazism, though he does discuss Wels when providing context for Hitler’s establishment of a dictatorship. Hitler’s People is a collection of 24 biographies, each of which tells us something important about who the Nazis were and how the regime worked. Evans starts with Hitler and spends 100 pages providing a short but comprehensive biography of the one-time nobody who became the leader of the Third Reich.
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The next section includes chapters on Hitler’s inner circle, whose personal proximity to the leader gave them unique positions within the overall history of the Nazi regime. Among these “paladins,” as Evans calls them, are familiar names such as Göring, the former fighter pilot who rose to become the “second man” in the Third Reich; Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the secret police and the driving force behind the implementation of the Holocaust; and Joseph Goebbels, the regime’s top propagandist.
Evans next focuses on those just outside the inner circle, such as Julius Streicher, Nazi Germany’s most notorious antisemitic propagandist and a key figure in the Holocaust, as well as Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Hans Frank, all of whom bore direct responsibility for the murder of millions of people.
These shorter biographical profiles are all important and well worth reading, but even more disturbing is a third cluster that Evans calls “The Instruments”: the people through whom the top officials carried out their vision of a Nazified world order. Of the nine biographies in this section, the only name many readers will recognize is Leni Riefenstahl. After 1945, the director of Triumph of the Will, the most important propaganda film made about Hitler during the Third Reich, presented herself to the world as an apolitical non-Nazi and got away with it.
The other “instruments” need to be better known, especially in the context of our current politics. They include the generals who ignored the international laws of war; the men and women who ran concentration camps and shot and tortured prisoners for fun; the doctors who killed sick children; and the women who cheered the regime and never apologized or felt remorse for its crimes. For example, Evans’s last chapter focuses on Luise Solmitz, a middle-class woman who fell for Hitler’s promise to return Germany to greatness, even though her own husband was classified as Jewish under Nazi law (he was a conservative nationalist, a veteran, and a Christian convert, but his mother was Jewish).
Hitler’s People is an excellent book, because it shows us who the Nazis really were: upper-class and middle-class Germans who faced downward social mobility, feared equality and social progress, and took out their frustrations over Germany’s defeat in World War I on those least responsible for it, Jews and Social Democrats. From the earliest days of the Nazi movement, they supported or fully tolerated its violence. Even after Hitler launched a genocidal war across Europe, they continued to cheer for him. And most of those who survived Nazism’s final defeat were unrepentant for the rest of their days.
Every reader of Evans’s book will encounter a few figures who stick in his or her mind. For some, it will be Goebbels, who has become the template for those who seek to manipulate public opinion and undermine democracy. For others, it will be the architect Albert Speer, whose successful myth-making autobiography, Inside the Third Reich, led many to believe that he was “the good Nazi.” Fortunately, Evans debunks such unhistorical nonsense.
The Past Is Never Dead
For me, the most striking chapter is on Karl Brandt, a doctor who drew on his medical knowledge to become a mass murderer in the service of the regime. No one forced him into it. He could have lived a prosperous life without becoming a Nazi, but he chose not to.
Brandt was a product of the German university system, and my only disappointment with Hitler’s People is that its subjects do not include any of the university presidents who oversaw the academic world that helped transform students of medicine into mass murderers. Many of these men would remain respected figures in their fields long after 1945. They do not deserve to have their complicity in the Nazi-era horrors so conveniently forgotten.
Evans writes with the wisdom and anger of a scholar who has spent a lifetime using history to make political points. He disdains the descendants of General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who still live on an estate that was a gift from Hitler. His chapter on Papen, who was released from prison in 1949 and lived until 1969, offers a searingly insightful look at political collaboration with evil. And he is no less appalled by Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Nazi women’s organization who remained unrepentant until her death in 1999.
Reading Hitler’s People, one cannot help but recognize the parallels to those who are complicit in, or openly profiting from, undermining democracy today. We should all share Evans’s anger. History has already shown us what happens when democracies allow their enemies to weaken them from within. Though we face an onslaught of manipulative propaganda and technologically augmented lies, there is still time to prove Mann right.
Timothy W. Ryback, Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power, Knopf, 2024.