They gathered in front of the presidential building. Business people, magnates and hand-picked allies were invited to attend and listen to their incumbent leader. The country faced a winter election. And those invited, that day, were told their leader would assure them of victory.
“We must stand before the election,” the leader said to the assembly of his faithful. “Regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat. [If defeated] we will remain in power by other means, with other weapons.”
The date was February 20, 1933. The location was the presidential palace in Berlin. The election was the last election in Germany prior to the World War II. Seven days later, Nazi sympathizers used a secret tunnel to enter Germany’s national assembly building. Inside the Reichstag building, they scattered gasoline and lit the fire that would destroy all but the outer shell of the Parliament (not restored until German reunification in 1990).
That’s the way an elected assembly was destroyed by fascist storm troopers who’d been given their ammunition by the Nazi Party and its leader, then Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
If this sounds eerily familiar, I want it to be. If it looks at all like the speech Donald J. Trump rattled off to his followers in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., and the reaction a week ago Wednesday, I want it to. Here’s part of what the out-going President said:
“We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies … about a fake election,” he said. “So, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue … to take back our country. We will never concede.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s family egged on the crowd. The President’s son encouraged them saying, “You can be a hero, or you can be a zero. But we are all watching.” And then, the President’s personal lawyer put the icing on the rally cake by entreating his faithful to carry out “trial by combat.”
Then, off went the audience – becoming rioters – to ransack the Capitol building.
I’ve witnessed historical authoritarianism through the eyes of the thousands of men and women I’ve interviewed for my books, about surviving Nazi-occupied Europe. Martin Maxwell, a Jewish boy in Vienna in the 1930s, witnessed those storm troopers haul away his family to the death camps. The Trump administration used cages to separate children of Hispanic descent from their parents on the U.S.-Mexico border. Not certain death, but certainly barbaric.
After the Italian army capitulated to the Canadian Army in 1943, Toronto Star war correspondent Gregory Clark came upon the village of Rionero. There, Nazi troops had assassinated an entire family – including a seven-year-old child – for allegedly aiding the liberating Canadians.
Clark wrote, “When the time comes for squaring of accounts [at a] peace conference … I vow to remember that little figure against the day these gray-green bastards plead before the bar of humility.” (He had to get special permission from the Star to publish the word “bastards” for Toronto readers).
In August 2017, a white supremacist plunged his car into protesters at a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. He killed a woman and injured 19 others. The President, afraid to upset his base supporters, did not decry the driver’s actions, but said, there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Perhaps the most damning example of President Trump’s thirst for power – as well as his criminality – occurred on Jan. 3, this year, when he was recorded telling Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state for Georgia, “I just want you to find 11,780 votes. There’s nothing wrong with saying that you’ve recalculated.”
The President, in effect, put himself above the law. And it’s perhaps the clearest example of the way absolute power corrupts absolutely. For comparison, I reread a passage in William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It’s only 1,599 pages long. In it, Shirer documents a Trump-like moment on April 26, 1942, when Hitler declares supremacy.
“The Führer must have all the rights postulated by him which serve to further or achieve victory,” the dictator declared. “Therefore, without being bound by existing legal regulations, as Leader of the Nation, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Head of Government, as Supreme Justice and Leader of the Party, the Führer must be in a position to force every German … to fulfill his duties.”
Shirer points out, in that moment, that Hitler had become not only the Führer, but the Law. “Not even in medieval times, nor further back in the barbarous tribal days, had any German arrogated such tyrannical power, nominal and legal as well as actual to himself.”
Nobody appears to want to call a spade a spade. The President, in my view, is Hitler in a blue suit.