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1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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To some Germans and, no doubt, to most foreigners it appeared that a charlatan had come to power in Berlin. To the majority of Germans Hitler had—or would shortly assume—the aura of a truly charismatic leader. They were to follow him blindly, as if he possessed a divine judgment, for the next twelve tempestuous years. |
Trump similarity number one |
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1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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For two years he attended classes at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach, near which his father had purchased a farm. There he sang in the choir, took singing lessons and, according to his own account,16 dreamed of one day taking holy orders. |
Hitler wanted to enter the clergy at age fifteen |
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1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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Hitler’s scholastic failure rankled in him in later life, when he heaped ridicule on the academic “gentry,” their degrees and diplomas and their pedagogical airs. Even in the last three or four years of his life, at Supreme Army Headquarters, where he allowed himself to be overwhelmed with details of military strategy, tactics and command, he would take an evening off to reminisce with his old party cronies on the stupidity of the teachers he had had in his youth. Some of these meanderings of this mad genius, now the Supreme Warlord personally directing his vast armies from the Volga to the English Channel, have been preserved.
When I think of the men who were my teachers, I realize that most of them were slightly mad. The men who could be regarded as good teachers were exceptional. It’s tragic to think that such people have the power to bar a young man’s way.—March 3, 1942.20
I have the most unpleasant recollections of the teachers who taught me. Their external appearance exuded uncleanliness; their collars were unkempt… They were the product of a proletariat denuded of all personal independence of thought, distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and most admirably fitted to become the pillars of an effete system of government which, thank God, is now a thing of the past.—April 12, 1942.21
When I recall my teachers at school, I realize that half of them were abnormal…. We pupils of old Austria were brought up to respect old people and women. But on our professors we had no mercy; they were our natural enemies. The majority of them were somewhat mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics! …I was in particular bad odor with the teachers. I showed not the slightest aptitude for foreign languages—though I might have, had not the teacher been a congenital idiot. I could not bear the sight of him.—August 29, 1942 |
Another similarity with trump/maga: the disdain for educators and education |
| My Notes |
1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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He used our budding national fanaticism as a means of educating us, frequently appealing to our sense of national honor.
This teacher made history my favorite subject.
And indeed, though he had no such intention, it was then that I became a young revolutionary |
When only the "good" parts of history are taught we can see an unrealistic lens of nationalism like MAGA wants us to see today by downplaying critical race theory
That teacher was an underground Nazi SS sympathizer
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| My Notes |
1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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Although Hitler was determined to become an artist, preferably a painter or at least an architect, he was already obsessed with politics at the age of sixteen. By then he had developed a violent hatred for the Hapsburg monarchy and all the non-German races in the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire over which it ruled, and an equally violent love for everything German. At sixteen he had become what he was to remain till his dying breath: a fanatical German nationalist. |
This actually sounds more like Charlie Kirk |
| My Notes |
1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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But this was not all. There was social revolt too and this often transcended the racial struggle. The disenfranchised lower classes were demanding the ballot, and the workers were insisting on the right to organize trade unions and to strike—not only for higher wages and better working conditions but to gain their democratic political ends. Indeed a general strike had finally brought universal manhood suffrage and with this the end of political dominance by the Austrian Germans, who numbered but a third of the population of the Austrian half of the empire.
To these developments Hitler, the fanatical young German–Austrian nationalist from Linz, was bitterly opposed. To him the empire was sinking into a “foul morass.” It could be saved only if the master race, the Germans, reasserted their old absolute authority. The non-German races, especially the Slavs and above all the Czechs, were an inferior people. It was up to the Germans to rule them with an iron hand. The Parliament must be abolished and an end put to all the democratic “nonsense. |
Very much like MAGA, Trump & Charlie Kirk
Ice exists today to purify America of the many migrants they want out claiming they are only going after violent gang members
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| My Notes |
1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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he developed a furious hatred for the party of the Social Democrats. “What most repelled me,” he says, “was its hostile attitude toward the struggle for the preservation of Germanism [and] its disgraceful courting of the Slavic ‘comrade’… In a few months I obtained what might have otherwise required decades: an understanding of a pestilential whore,* cloaking herself as social virtue and brotherly love. |
Very much again the calling card of MAGA vs modern democrats |
| My Notes |
1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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This third lesson, though it was surely based on faulty observation and compounded of his own immense prejudices, intrigued the young Hitler. Within ten years he would put it to good use for his own ends.
I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty…
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This sums up the tactics of MAGA and their propaganda so succinctly that its eerie to see its like today |
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1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.49
No more precise analysis of Nazi tactics, as Hitler was eventually to develop them, was ever written |
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1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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Regardless of how much room for criticism there was in any religious denomination,” he says, in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-von-Rom (Away from Rome) movement was a tactical error, “a political party must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation |
Christian nationalism; Trump Bible |
| My Notes |
1. Birth of the Third Reich |
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Mein Kampf is sprinkled with lurid allusions to uncouth Jews seducing innocent Christian girls and thus adulterating their blood. Hitler can write of the “nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by repulsive, crooked-legged Jew bastards.” As Rudolf Olden has pointed out, one of the roots of Hitler’s anti-Semitism may have been his tortured sexual envy. Though he was in his early twenties, so far as is known he had no relations of any kind with women during his sojourn in Vienna. |
We this time and time again: sexual repression that leads to atrocity.
So many pedophiles in the GOP
Terror attacks by Muslims
Mormon men that are consumed by pornography |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
there is no doubt that Corporal Hitler earned the Iron Cross, First Class. He wore it proudly to the end of his life.
And yet, as soldiers go, he was a peculiar fellow, as more than one of his comrades remarked. No letters or presents from home came to him, as they did to the others. He never asked for leave; he had not even a combat soldier’s interest in women. He never grumbled, as did the bravest of men, about the filth, the lice, the mud, the stench, of the front line. He was the impassioned warrior, deadly serious at all times about the war’s aims and Germany’s manifest destiny. |
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| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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Suddenly he would leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy.”4 Whereupon he would launch into a vitriolic attack on these “invisible foes”—the Jews and the Marxists. Had he not learned in Vienna that they were the source of all evil? |
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2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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millions of Germans refused to concede this. They had, to find scapegoats for the defeat and for their humiliation and misery. They easily convinced themselves that they had found them in the “November criminals” who had signed the surrender and established democratic government in the place of the old autocracy. The gullibility of the Germans is a subject which Hitler often harps on in Mein Kampf. He was shortly to take full advantage of it. |
Like MAGA of today; very gullible |
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2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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What was the Right in Bavaria at this chaotic time? It was the Regular Army, the Reichswehr; it was the monarchists, who wished the Wittelbachs back. It was a mass of conservatives who despised the democratic Republic established in Berlin; and as time went on it was above all the great mob of demobilized soldiers for whom the bottom had fallen out of the world in 1918, uprooted men who could not find jobs or their way back to the peaceful society they had left in 1914, men grown tough and violent |
Maga/trump don't want democracy; he calls Democrats enemiesthey want Christian nationalism
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| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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through war who could not shake themselves from ingrained habit and who, as Hitler, who for a while was one of them, would later say, “became revolutionaries who favored revolution for its own sake and desired to see revolution established as a permanent condition.” |
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2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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In Munich at the same time a different kind of military coup d’état was more successful. On March 14, 1920, the Reichswehr overthrew the Hoffmann Socialist government and installed a right-wing regime under Gustav von Kahr. And now the Bavarian capital became a magnet for all those forces in Germany which were determined to overthrow the Republic, set up an authoritarian regime and repudiate the Diktat of Versailles. Here the condottieri of the free corps, including the members of the Ehrhardt Brigade, found a refuge and a welcome. Here General Ludendorff settled, along with a host of other disgruntled, discharged Army officers.* Here were plotted the political murders, among them that of Matthias Erzberger, the moderate Catholic politician who had had the courage to sign the armistice when the generals backed out; and of Walther Rathenau, the brilliant, cultured Foreign Minister, whom the extremists hated for being a Jew and for carrying out the national government’s policy of trying to fulfill at least some of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. |
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| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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To Hitler’s surprise, it reflected a good many ideas which he himself had acquired over the years. Drexler’s principal aim was to build a political party which would be based on the masses of the working class but which, unlike the Social Democrats, would be strongly nationalist. |
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2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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Surely the anti-Semitic points of the program promulgated in the Munich beer hall on the evening of February 24, 1920, constituted a dire warning. The Jews were to be denied office and even citizenship in Germany and excluded from the press. All who had entered the Reich after August 2, 1914, were to be expelled |
The MAGA deportationS without due process |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
These demands had been put in at the insistence of Drexler and Feder, who apparently really believed in the “socialism” of National Socialism. They were the ideas which Hitler was to find embarrassing when the big industrialists and landlords began to pour money into the party coffers, and of course nothing was ever done about them. |
"Socialism" was a ploy by Hitler to mobilize the masses; his movement was always about authoritarianism |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
In Vienna, as we have seen, he was intrigued by what he called the “infamous spiritual and physical terror” which he thought was employed by the Social Democrats against their political opponents.* Now he turned it to good purpose in his own anti-Socialist party. At first ex-servicemen were assigned to the meetings to silence hecklers and, if necessary, toss them out. In the summer of 1920, soon after the party had added “National Socialist” to the name of the “German Workers’ Party” and became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or N.S.D.A.P., as it was now to be familiarly known, Hitler organized a bunch of roughneck war veterans into “strong-arm” squads, Ordnertruppe, under the command of Emil Maurice, an ex-convict and watchmaker. On October 5, 1921, after camouflaging themselves for a short time as the “Gymnastic and Sports Division” of the party to escape suppression by the Berlin government, they were officially named the Sturmabteilung, from which the name S.A. came. The storm troopers, outfitted in brown uniforms, were recruited largely from the freebooters of the free corps and placed under the command of Johann Ulrich Klintzich, an aide of the notorious Captain Ehrhardt, who had recently been released from imprisonment in connection with the murder of Erzberger. |
It is typical to see right-wing support from military that values a strong central command |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
Hitler had told an audience some months before, “The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent—if necessary by force—all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our |
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| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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fellow countrymen |
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| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
In the summer of 1920 Hitler, the frustrated artist but now becoming the master propagandist, came up with an inspiration which can only be described as a stroke of genius. What the party lacked, he saw, was an emblem, a flag, a symbol, which would express what the new organization stood for and appeal to the imagination of the masses, who, as Hitler reasoned, must have some striking banner to follow and to fight under |
Make America great again the red hats and Trump flags certainly appeal to the right-wing masses |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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The Nazis now had a symbol which no other party could match. The hooked cross seemed to possess some mystic power of its own, to beckon to action in a new direction the insecure lower middle classes which had been floundering in the uncertainty of the first chaotic postwar years. They began to flock under its banner |
Just like MAGA |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
Nearly a year before, in December of 1920, the party had acquired a run-down newspaper badly in debt, the Voelkischer Beobachter, an anti-Semitic gossip sheet which appeared twice a week. Exactly where the sixty thousand marks for its purchase came from was a secret which Hitler kept well, but it is known that Eckart and Roehm persuaded Major General Ritter von Epp, Roehm’s commanding officer in the Reichswehr and himself a member of the party, to raise the sum. Most likely it came from Army secret funds. At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels. |
Trump's propaganda machine: truth social |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
Where all authority has vanished, only a man of the people can establish authority… The deeper the dictator was originally rooted in the broad masses, the better he understands how to treat them psychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the more supporters he will win among these most energetic ranks of the people. He himself has nothing in common with the mass; like every great man he is all personality… When necessity commands, he does not shrink before bloodshed. Great questions are always decided by blood and iron… In order to reach his goal, he is prepared to trample on his closest friends… The |
Hello...trump |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
lawgiver proceeds with terrible hardness… As the need arises, he can trample them [the people] with the boots of a grenadier… |
Good ole Trump |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
4 |
This was to be his attitude toward almost all of his close collaborators, no matter how murky their past—or indeed their present. Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes |
The dregs of ice are useful to Trump Or keeping musk around after he did the Nazi salute |
| My Notes |
2. Birth of the Nazi Party |
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He stood Julius Streicher, for example, almost to the end. This depraved sadist, who started life as an elementary-school teacher, was one of the most disreputable men around Hitler from 1922 until 1939, when his star finally faded. A famous fornicator, as he boasted, who blackmailed even the husbands of women who were his mistresses, he made his fame and fortune as a blindly fanatical anti-Semite. His notorious weekly, Der Stuermer, thrived on lurid tales of Jewish sexual crimes and Jewish “ritual murders”; its obscenity was nauseating, even to many Nazis. Streicher was also a noted pornographist. He became known as the “uncrowned King of Franconia” with the center of his power in Nuremberg, where his word was law and where no one who crossed him or displeased him was safe from prison and torture. |
I'm reminded of the Epstein files and why Trump continues to hide them |
| My Notes |
3. Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch |
4 |
treason laws were ruthlessly applied to the supporters of the Republic; those on the Right who tried to overthrow it, as Adolf Hitler was soon to learn, got off either free or with the lightest of sentences. Even the assassins, if they were of the Right and their victims democrats, were leniently treated by the courts or, as often happened, helped to escape from the custody of the courts by Army officers and right-wing extremists |
Another similarity: Jan 6th traitors pardoned |
| My Notes |
3. Versailles, Weimar and the Beer Hall Putsch |
4 |
In the heart of the people,” cried Oswald Spengler, who had skyrocketed to fame with his book The Decline of the West, “the Weimar Constitution is already doomed.” Down in Bavaria the young firebrand Adolf Hitler grasped the strength of the new nationalist, antidemocratic, antirepublican tide. He began to ride it. |
Trump & the far right crowd again |
| My Notes |
4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich |
4 |
When he left Austria for Germany in 1913 at the age of twenty-four, he was full of a burning passion for German nationalism, a hatred for democracy, Marxism and the Jews and a certainty that Providence had chosen the Aryans, especially the Germans, to be the master race. |
A modern-day contrivance of MAGA that Nazis were actually socialists. No, he hated socialism/communism |
| My Notes |
4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich |
4 |
Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? France will be destroyed, but that is secondary to the German drive eastward. First the immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly by Germans will be taken. And what are these? Obviously Austria, the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and the western part of Poland, including Danzig. After that, Russia herself. Why was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve these very ends? |
Kamala Harris warned us about project 2025; people voted for him anyway because they wanted economic prosperity |
| My Notes |
4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich |
4 |
And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as “socialist,” Hitler was even more vague on the kind of “socialism” he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a definition of a “socialist” which he gave in a speech on July 28, 1922:
Whoever is prepared to make the national cause his own to such an extent that he knows no higher ideal than the welfare of his nation; whoever has understood our great national anthem, “Deutschland ueber Alles,” to mean that nothing in the wide world surpasses in his eyes this Germany, people and land—that man is a Socialist |
When the uneducated argue that Nazis were socialist: this definition of socialism by Hitler is conservative nationalism |
| My Notes |
4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich |
4 |
But even worse than sharing the master’s language was something else.
The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and, therefore, lost his sojourn in the paradise which he had made for himself. He became submerged in a racial mixture and gradually lost his cultural creativeness. |
This has been a talking point of MAGA and turning point |
| My Notes |
4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich |
4 |
A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape |
MAGA hasn't gone that far, thankfully but they are big on procreation as a nationalist duty |
| My Notes |
4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich |
4 |
The great questions of the day,” Bismarck declared on becoming Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862, “will not be settled by resolutions and majority votes—that was the mistake of the men of 1848 and 1849—but by blood and iron.” That was exactly the way he proceeded to settle them, though it must be said that he added a touch of diplomatic finesse, often of the most deceitful kind. Bismarck’s aim was to destroy liberalism, bolster the power of conservatism—that is, of the Junkers, the Army and the crown—and make Prussia, as against Austria, the dominant power not only among the Germans but, if possible, in Europe as well. “Germany looks not to Prussia’s liberalism,” he told the deputies in the Prussian parliament, “but to her force.” |
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| My Notes |
4. The Mind of Hitler and the Roots of the Third Reich |
4 |
Such teachings, carried to their extremity by Nietzsche and applauded by a host of lesser Germans, seem to have exerted a strong appeal on Hitler.* A genius with a mission was above the law; he could not be bound by “bourgeois” morals. |
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| My Notes |
5. The Road to Power: 1925–31 |
4 |
No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him. |
That's not very nice: he even called them perverts later |
| My Notes |
5. The Road to Power: 1925–31 |
4 |
really the same thing. “You and I,” he declared, “are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies.”
To Adolf Hitler this was rank heresy, and he watched with increasing uneasiness the success of the Strasser brothers and Goebbels in building up a vigorous, radical, proletarian wing of the party in the north. |
Hitler never considered Nazis & communists the same thing like Goebbels did |
| My Notes |
5. The Road to Power: 1925–31 |
4 |
he could write in the Nazi press: “Never in my life have I been so well disposed and inwardly contented as in these days. For hard reality has opened the eyes of millions of Germans to the unprecedented swindles, lies and betrayals of the Marxist deceivers of the people |
Once again Hitler was No fan of communists & socialists |
| My Notes |
5. The Road to Power: 1925–31 |
4 |
He would make Germany strong again |
Where have we heard that slogan before? |
| My Notes |
5. The Road to Power: 1925–31 |
4 |
And then in words which were prophetic of what he himself one day would do, he warned the officers of what would happen to them if the Marxists triumphed over the Nazis. Should that happen, he said,
You may write over the German Army: “The end of the German Army.” For then, gentlemen, you must definitely become political…. You may then become hangmen of the regime and political commissars, and if you do not behave your wife and child will be put behind locked doors. And if you still do not behave, you will be thrown out and perhaps stood up against a wall |
Exactly what MAGA & MAGA- media do today: scare you |
| My Notes |
5. The Road to Power: 1925–31 |
4 |
The month of September 1930 marked a turning point in the road that was leading the Germans inexorably toward the Third Reich. The surprising success of the Nazi Party in the national elections convinced not only millions of ordinary people but many leaders in business and in the Army that perhaps here was an upsurge that could not be stopped. They might not like the party’s demagoguery and its vulgarity, but on the other hand it was arousing the old feelings of German patriotism and nationalism which had been so muted during the first ten years of the Republic |
The vulgarity of trump/maga was also over looked because it was "America first" |
| My Notes |
5. The Road to Power: 1925–31 |
4 |
The party had to play both sides of the tracks. It had to allow Strasser, Goebbels and the crank Feder to beguile the masses with the cry that the National Socialists were truly “socialists” and against the money barons |
It was a ploy to call the Nazis "socialists" |
| My Notes |
6. The Last Days of the Republic: 1931–33 |
5 |
It was a bitter and confusing campaign. In the Reichstag Goebbels branded Hindenburg as “the candidate of the party of the deserters” and was expelled from the chamber for insulting the President |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. “Private enterprise,” he said, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality… All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen… We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist.” He promised the businessmen that he would “eliminate” the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
4 |
Now we stand before the last election,” Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that “regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat.” If he did not win, he would stay in power “by other means… with other weapons.” |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
4 |
Despite increasing provocation by the Nazi authorities there was no sign of a revolution, Communist or Socialist, bursting into flames as the electoral campaign got under way. By the beginning of February the Hitler government had banned all Communist meetings and shut down the Communist press. Social Democrat rallies were either forbidden or broken up by the S.A. rowdies, and the leading Socialist newspapers were continually suspended. Even the Catholic Center Party did not escape the Nazi terror. Stegerwald, the leader of the Catholic Trade Unions, was beaten by Brownshirts when he attempted to address a meeting, and Bruening was obliged to seek police protection at another rally after S.A. troopers had wounded a number of his followers. Altogether fifty-one anti-Nazis were listed as murdered during the electoral campaign, and the Nazis claimed that eighteen of their own number had been done to death. |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
4 |
and replaced them with Nazis, mostly S.A. and S.S. officers. He ordered the police to avoid “at all costs” hostility to the S.A., the S.S. and the Stahlhelm but on the other hand to show no mercy to those who were “hostile to the State.” He urged the police “to make use of firearms” and warned that those who didn’t would be punished. This was an outright call for the shooting down of all who opposed Hitler by the police of a state (Prussia) which controlled two thirds of Germany. Just to make sure that the job would be ruthlessly done, Goering on February 22 established an auxiliary police force of 50,000 men, of whom 40,000 were drawn from the ranks of the S.A. and the S.S. and the rest from the Stahlhelm. Police power in Prussia was thus largely carried out by Nazi thugs. It was a rash German who appealed to such a “police” for protection against the Nazi terrorists |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
And yet despite all the terror the “Bolshevik revolution” which Goebbels, Hitler and Goering were looking for failed to “burst into flames.” If it could not be provoked, might it not have to be invented? |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
The Reichstag is on fire!’ I am sure he is telling a tall tale and decline even to mention it to the Fuehrer.”4
But the diners at the Herrenklub were just around the corner from the Reichstag.
Suddenly [Papen later wrote] we noticed a red glow through the windows and heard sounds of shouting in the street. One of the servants came hurrying up to me and whispered: “The Reichstag is on fire!” which I repeated to the President. He got up and from the window we could see the dome of the Reichstag looking as though it were illuminated by searchlights. Every now and again a burst of flame and a swirl of smoke blurred the outline.5
The Vice-Chancellor packed the aged President home in his own car and hurried off to the burning building. In the meantime Goebbels, according to his account, had had second thoughts about Putzi Hanfstaengl’s “tall tale,” had made some telephone calls and learned that the Reichstag was in flames. Within a few seconds he and his Fuehrer were racing “at sixty miles an hour down the Charlottenburger Chaussee toward the scene of the crime.”
That it was a crime, a Communist crime, they proclaimed at once on arrival at the fire. Goering, sweating and puffing and quite beside himself with excitement, was already there ahead of them declaiming to heaven, as Papen later recalled, that “this is a Communist crime against the new government.” To the new Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, Goering shouted, “This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very night be strung up |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
Even at Nuremberg the mystery could not be entirely unraveled, though there is enough evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that it was the Nazis who planned the arson and carried it out for their own political ends. |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
Thus with one stroke Hitler was able not only to legally gag his opponents and arrest them at his will but, by making the trumped-up Communist threat “official,” as it were, to throw millions of the middle class and the peasantry into a frenzy of fear that unless they voted for National Socialism at the elections a week hence, the Bolsheviks might take over. Some four thousand Communist officials and a great many Social Democrat and liberal leaders were arrested, including members of the Reichstag, who, according to the law, were immune from arrest. This was the first experience Germans had had with Nazi terror backed up by the government |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
all states except Prussia and ordering them reconstituted on the basis of the votes cast in the last Reichstag election. Communist seats were not to be filled. But this solution lasted only a week. The Chancellor, working at feverish haste, issued a new law on April 7, appointing Reich Governors (Reichs-staathaelter) in all the states and empowering them to appoint and remove local governments, dissolve the diets, and appoint and dismiss state officials and judges. Each of the new governors was a Nazi and they were “required” to carry out “the general policy laid down by the Reich Chancellor. |
“The Chancellor, working at feverish haste, issued a new law”
This is like Trump & his furious pace of issuing exec orders faster than Congress (even though the MAGA-majority won’t) could check him
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
On May 19, 1933, the Social Democrats—those who were not in jail or in exile—voted in the Reichstag without a dissenting voice to approve Hitler’s foreign policy. Nine days before, Goering’s police had seized the party’s buildings and newspapers and confiscated its property. Nevertheless, the Socialists still tried to appease Hitler. They denounced their comrades abroad who were attacking the Fuehrer. On June 19 they elected a new party committee, but three days later Frick put an end to their attempts to compromise by dissolving the Social Democratic Party as “subversive and inimical to the State.” Paul Lobe, the surviving leader, and several of his party members in the Reichstag were arrested. The Communists, of course, had already been suppressed |
Trump would love nothing more than to eliminate the Dem party he has been working at this already by calling then enemies and issuing on exec order that antifa is a terrorist org |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
The National Socialist German Workers’ Party constitutes the only political party in Germany.
Whoever undertakes to maintain the organizational structure of another political party or to form a new political party will be punished with penal servitude up to three years or with imprisonment of from six months to three years, if the deed is not subject to a greater penalty according to other regulations |
Hasn't happened yet to Dems by MAGA but that's their goal |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
Later in his speech to more than 100,000 workers at the airfield Hitler pronounced the motto, “Honor work and respect the worker!” and promised that May Day would be celebrated in honor of German labor “throughout the centuries.”
Late that night Goebbels, after describing in his most purple prose the tremendous enthusiasm of the workers for this May Day celebration which he had so brilliantly staged, added a curious sentence in his diary: “Tomorrow we shall occupy the trade-union buildings. There will be little resistance.”*16
That is what happened. On May 2 the trade-union headquarters throughout the country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unions dissolved and the leaders arrested. Many were beaten and lodged in concentration camps. Theodor Leipart and Peter Grassmann, the chairmen of the Trade Union Confederation, had openly pledged themselves to cooperate with the Nazi regime. No matter, they were arrested. “The Leiparts and Grassmanns,” said Dr. Robert Ley, the alcoholic Cologne party boss who was assigned by Hitler to take over the unions and establish the German Labor |
Brilliant propaganda at play again |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
Front, “may hypocritically declare their devotion to the Fuehrer as much as they like—but it is better that they should be in prison.” And that is where they were put.
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
gangs roamed the streets, arresting and beating up and sometimes murdering whomever they pleased while the police looked on without lifting a nightstick. The terror in the streets was not the result of the breakdown of the State’s authority, as it had been in the French Revolution, but on the contrary was carried out with the encouragement and often on the orders of the State, whose authority in Germany had never been |
More similarities to ice again |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
greater or more concentrated. Judges were intimidated; they were afraid for their lives if they convicted and sentenced a storm trooper even for cold-blooded murder. Hitler was now the law, as Goering said, and as late as May and June 1933 the Fuehrer was declaiming that “the National Socialist Revolution has not yet run its course” and that “it will be victoriously completed only if a new German people is educated.” In Nazi parlance, “educated” meant “intimidated”—to a point where all would accept docilely the Nazi dictatorship and its barbarism |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
But Hitler had contrary thoughts. For him the Nazi socialist slogans had been merely propaganda, means of winning over the |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
masses on his way to power. Now that he had the power he was uninterested in them. |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
No more authoritative statement was ever made that the Nazi revolution was political, not economic. To back up his words, Hitler dismissed a number of Nazi “radicals” who had tried to seize control of the employers’ associations. He restored Krupp von Bohlen and Fritz Thyssen to their positions of leadership in them, dissolved the Combat League of Middle-Class Tradespeople, which had annoyed the big department stores, and in place of Hugenberg named Dr. Karl Schmitt as Minister of Economics. Schmitt was the most orthodox of businessmen, director general of Allianz, Germany’s largest insurance company, and he lost no time in putting an end to the schemes of the National Socialists who had been naïve enough to take their party program seriously.
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This is like the poor - uneducated MAGA voters that don't unite against billionaires and their political backers... Instead they enable them by their votes |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
The government [must be] mindful of the old maxim, “Only weaklings suffer no criticism” |
Trump seems to lose his mind at the barbs he takes from talk- show hosts, even trying to intimate that it's illegal |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
How many were slain in the purge was never definitely established. In his Reichstag speech of July 13, Hitler announced that sixty-one persons were shot, including nineteen “higher S.A. leaders,” that thirteen more died “resisting arrest” and that three “committed suicide”—a total of seventy-seven. The White Book of the Purge, published by émigrés in Paris, stated that 401 had been slain, but it identified only 116 of them. At the Munich trial in 1957, the figure of “more than 1,000” was given |
How soon before trump/maga take out their political enemies for the "good of the nation?"
I would say they already tried on Jan 6th |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
And yet Hitler had known all along, from the earliest days of the party, that a large number of his closest and most important followers were sexual perverts and convicted murderers. It was common talk, for instance, that Heines used to send S.A. men scouring all over Germany to find him suitable male lovers. These things Hitler had not only tolerated but defended; more than once he had warned his party comrades against being too squeamish about a man’s personal morals if he were a fanatical fighter for the movement. Now, on June 30, 1934, he professed to be shocked by the moral degeneration of some of his oldest lieutenants. |
While the author's prejudices are on full display here it is synonymous with Trump pardoning criminals me being ok with such as long as they are on his side. See santos |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
It was natural, no doubt, that the Army should be pleased with the elimination of its rival, the S.A., but what about the sense of honor, let alone of decency, of an officer corps which not only condoned but openly praised a government for carrying out a massacre without precedent in German history, during which two of its leading officers, Generals von Schleicher and von Bredow, having been branded as traitors, were coldbloodedly murdered? Only the voices of the eighty-five-year-old Field Marshal von Mackensen and of General von Hammerstein, the former Commander in Chief of the Army, were raised in protest against the murder of their two fellow officers and the charges of treason which had been the excuse for it.* This behavior of the corps was a black stain on the honor of the Army; it was also a mark of its unbelievable shortsightedness |
"Just following orders" - yes, the calling card of ice and the National guard: too limited in reason to see the dishonor of their actions in following corrupt leadership |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
All through the summer the seemingly indestructible Hindenburg had been sinking and on August 2, at nine in the morning, he died in his eighty-seventh year. At noon, three hours later, it was announced that according to a law enacted by the cabinet on the preceding day the offices of Chancellor and President had been combined and that Adolf Hitler had taken over the powers of the head of state and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. The title of President was abolished; Hitler would be known as Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor. |
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| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
To leave no loopholes Hitler exacted from all officers and men of the armed forces an oath of allegiance—not to Germany, not to the constitution, which he had violated by not calling for the election of Hindenburg’s successor, but to himself. It read:
I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.
From August 1934 on, the generals, who up to that time could have overthrown the Nazi regime with ease had they so desired, thus tied themselves to the person of Adolf Hitler, recognizing him as the highest legitimate authority in the land and binding themselves to him by an oath of fealty which they felt honor-bound to obey in all circumstances no matter how degrading to them and the Fatherland. It was an oath which was to trouble the conscience of quite a few high officers when their acknowledged leader set off on a path which they felt could only lead to the nation’s destruction and which they opposed. It was also a pledge which enabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves from any personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carried out on the orders of a Supreme Commander whose true nature they had seen for themselves in the butchery of June 30. One of the appalling aberrations of the German officer corps from this point on rose out of this conflict of “honor”—a word which, as this author can testify by personal experience, was often on their lips and of which they had such a curious concept. Later and often, by honoring their oath they dishonored themselves as human beings and trod in the mud the moral code of their corps. |
How easily they were "bought" by making them swear on oath. And how easily they (MAGA) could ensnare the American military against its own citizens in the exact same way |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
Even before Hindenburg’s death, he had made the cabinet promulgate a law giving him the President’s powers. This was on August 1, the day before the Field Marshal died. That the “law” was illegal also made little difference in a Germany where the former Austrian corporal had now become the law itself. |
No other President in American history has flouted the law like Trump and with him not allowed to be prosecuted for official acts, courtesy of the corrupt Supreme Court, he is free to operate at will |
| My Notes |
7. The Nazification of Germany: 1933–34 |
5 |
But what mattered the law now? It mattered not to Papen, who cheerfully went off to serve Hitler as minister in Vienna and smooth over the mess caused by the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss by the Nazis. It mattered not to the generals, who went eagerly to work to build up Hitler’s Army. It mattered not to the industrialists, who turned enthusiastically to the profitable business of rearmament. Conservatives of the old school, “decent” Germans like Baron von Neurath in the Foreign Office and Dr. Schacht in the Reichsbank, did not resign. No one resigned. In fact, Dr. Schacht took on the added duties of Minister of Economics on August 2, the day Hitler seized the powers of the expiring President.
And the German people? On August 19, some 95 per cent of those who had registered went to the polls, and 90 per cent, more than thirty-eight million of them, voted approval of Hitler’s usurpation of complete power. Only four and a quarter million Germans had the courage—or the desire—to vote “No.” |
The majority of the America people voted for trump/maga - No matter how much worse it gets, we brought it upon ourselves because we cared more about money in our pocket (we thought he would restore the economy) than human decency and values |