The Nazis Take Power
From Facing History and Ourselves:
Holocaust and Human Behavior, Chapter 4
Within weeks of taking office, Adolf Hitler was altering German life. Within a year, Joseph Goebbels, one of his top aides, could boast:
The revolution that we have made is a total revolution. It encompasses every aspect of public life from the bottom up… We have replaced individuality with collective racial consciousness and the individual with the community… We must develop the organizations in which every individual’s entire life will be regulated by the Volk community, as represented by the Party. There is no longer arbitrary will. There are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself… The
time of personal happiness is over.1
How did Hitler do it? How did he destroy the Weimar Republic and replace it with a totalitarian government – one that controls every part of a person’s life? Many people have pointed out that he did not destroy democracy all at once. Instead, he moved gradually, with one seemingly small compromise leading to another and yet another. By the time many were aware of the danger, they were isolated and alone. This chapter details those steps. It also explores why few Germans protested the loss of their freedom and many even applauded the changes the Nazis brought to the nation. Historian Fritz Stern offers one answer. “The great appeal of National Socialism – and perhaps of every totalitarian dictatorship in this century – was the promise of absolute authority. Here was
clarity, simplicity.” To achieve that clarity, the German people gave up “what for so long they had taken for granted: the formal rule of law, a free press, freedom of expression, and the elementary protection of habeas corpus.”2
British historian A. J. P. Taylor answers the question by focusing on a unique quality in Adolf Hitler: “the gift of translating commonplace thoughts into action. He took seriously what was to others mere talk. The driving force in him was a terrifying literalism. Writers had been running down democracy for half a century. It took Hitler to create a totalitarian dictatorship… Again, there was nothing new in anti-Semitism… Everything which Hitler did against the Jews followed logically from the racial doctrines
in which most Germans vaguely believed. It was the same with foreign policy... Hitler took [the Germans] at their word. He made the Germans live up to their professions, or
down to them – much to their regret.”3
Other scholars note that upon taking office, Hitler stirred up a whirlwind of promises and demands, terrorizing opponents and dividing the German people. There was, as one man recalled, “no time to think... The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.”4 Hannah Arendt, a scholar who left Germany in the 1930s, spent years reflecting on totalitarian regimes. She concluded, “Of all the forms of political organization that do not permit freedom, only totalitarianism consciously seeks
to crowd out the ability to think. Man cannot be silenced, he can only be crowded into not speaking. Under all other conditions, even within the racing noise of our time, thinking is possible.”5
Download Chapter 4 from Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior
Selected Readings from the Chapter
Notes
1 Joseph Goebbels, The Early Goebbels Diaries, ed. H. Heiber (London, 1962).
2 Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions (A. Knopf, Inc., 1987), 152.
3 A.J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Atheneum, 1961), 71.
4 Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press,
1955), 167. Copyright 1955 by the University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission.
5 Quoted in Leon Botstein, “Hannah Arendt: The Jewish Question,” New Republic, 21, October, 1978, 34.
