We Are Insufficiently Immunized Against Nazis

The Third Reich’s script would please far too many today

The recent drama and debate surrounding Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper has surprised many people. After the argument was made during the interview that perhaps Churchill was more of a villain in World War II than Hitler, quite a few people have publicly suggested that they agree. Cooper has also argued that, as bad as the Nazis were, the kind of cultural things we see today are worse—like the Last Supper bit of the Olympics opening ceremony this summer. His tweet to that effect had thousands of likes. Such voices might be outliers, but a case can be made that Americans, generally, have been insufficiently immunized against Nazis.

Many Americans believe that they would not be susceptible to Nazism because they do not endorse eliminationist antisemitism. Of course, both major political parties have antisemitic fringes that have not been excluded. Conspiracy theories are on the rise, and many conspiracy theories work their way around to antisemitism eventually. But generally, Americans forget that eliminationist antisemitism was not the entire Nazi political platform. Packaged with other things, it was much easier to accept. 

If we examine some of the Nazi appeal apart from antisemitism, we see positions that could win votes today. The Nazis claimed to be the party of traditional values. They opposed the new and edgy culture of the Weimar Republic with its changing gender roles, modern art, and imported non-traditional music. The Nazis were pronatalist and anti-abortion; they created government policies to encourage women to stay home with their families. The Nazis preferred German folk music and opera to American jazz. They wanted to eliminate books they found threatening. 

The Nazi culture wars script would not shock us today, and it would please plenty of people. They supported a stylized art not too dissimilar from some of the “tradlife” art we see online today, which advocates a “traditional life” and is often tagged #tradlife. Nazi images show young, handsome, white men in martial poses or supporting the country, celebrate traditional rural living and the German landscape, and depict happy, healthy young women who do not look at all like urban social climbers. It may sound Norman Rockwell, but his images include and celebrate the imperfect, the impish, the elderly, and workers. Rockwell’s work may be somewhat saccharine, but it does not espouse a racial ideal. 

Americans today often wonder how so many people were hoodwinked by Hitler or were forced to go along. The Germans were not all hypnotized by a madman. If you want to be stunned into silence and reconsider your own ability to make the right choice, read Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. Most Germans went along very willingly, including those who belonged to or attended churches. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an outlier; so were Hans and Sophie Scholl. Many Germans were even enthusiastic about the Nazi movement; just read Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. It is shocking that we forget or try to explain this away rather than confront why it happened. 

We ought to remember that many people outside of Germany opposed the Nazis before the extent of the Holocaust was known. It was not only eliminationist antisemitism that made the Germans our enemy. The Holocaust was not the only thing wrong with the Third Reich. Plenty of what came with the Nazi pro-life movement and better highways was altogether bad. And we are not sufficiently on guard against many of those things.

The 1920s and 1930s were a confusing and turbulent time for many in the West. The Nazis relied on the rhetoric of fear and anger to respond to the era and attract people to their cause. They emphasized German victimhood and warned that German culture was being destroyed. Encouraging people to fear means inviting them to do things they would not otherwise do. The scared dog bites. Consider the contrast with the United States when Franklin Roosevelt became president. Times were tough in the U.S., too. The situation was bleak. But without denying the conditions, Roosevelt told American citizens that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Fear is no path to the future. Any platform based on fear should be considered suspect.

The Nazis promised a strong country: military strength, increased territory, greater wealth. They delivered with territorial aggression and antidemocratic measures. They disliked voting, banned other political parties, and realigned the bureaucracy with the Nazi Party. People were so interested in a strong country they did not mind what shape that strength would take. The Nazis built roads, manufactured cars, and put radios in every home. They ended the annoying election cycle. For this, people were willing to attack neighboring countries and even kill their own neighbors.

The Nazis offered unity. They promised a country not overrun by individualism, and they built it on conformity. What they did not like, they banned. Objectionable books, films, newspapers, and opinions were silenced or destroyed. People who did not align were also quieted or eliminated. The Nazis opposed liberty in every respect. They dissolved the boundary between public and private life.

And their unity required the elimination of internal enemies. Not everyone minded seeing communists sidelined and homosexuals punished. People were willing to put up with authoritarian rule to be rid of political and cultural differences. But the list of internal enemies is always capable of expanding and must expand if you are attempting to sustain power with fear-based rhetoric and totalitarian measures. And as you know from the famous quote, sooner or later they would come for you. 

What kind of a country did Germany become? There was no such thing as privacy in that world. A block leader would be sure you listened to the right radio programs. Summer camps would indoctrinate your children. Rather than enjoying their unity and shared commitments, the German people began to suspect and fear each other. Consider this passage from You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. Wolfe was writing from his own personal experience before World War II. He describes a scene in which his American main character visiting Germany saw two Germans meet for the first time. 

There was a formidable quality in the mutual suspicion they displayed as their eyes met. George had observed the same phenomenon many times before in the encounters of Germans who were either total strangers or who did not know each other well. At once their defenses would be up, as if each distrusted the other on sight and demanded full credentials and assurances before relenting into any betrayal of friendliness and confidence.

George had seen it many times in Germany, but “it never failed to be alarming to him”—in part because “he had never seen anything like it at home, or anywhere else in the world before.” 

In 1937 Pius XI warned against the Third Reich in his papal encyclical “Mit Brennender Sorge” (“With Burning Anxiety”). The Pope rightly recognized that the Nazi ideas of racial superiority and of God’s special favor for a single country were counter to the Christian message and the Christian idea of the imago dei. In point eight, the Pope writes: 

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community—however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things—whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

In point eleven, the Pope clarifies the fundamental error within such a distortion of Christianity: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations before whose immensity they are ‘as a drop of a bucket’” (Isaiah xI, 15).

The Nazis promised many things that people wanted. Plenty of Americans, looking for a way out of confusing modernity, would affirm parts of the Nazi platform. The Nazis offered an end to cultural confusion, to the annoying voices of political opponents, an end to military vulnerability, an end to listening to other countries. For these things, people would accept almost anything. 

They lost liberty and democracy. They embraced authoritarianism. They became the enemies of their neighbors, at home and abroad. They betrayed their faith and accepted Nazism’s “positive Christianity.” They prevented the human flourishing of their own people. They embraced the evil of eliminationist antisemitism.

All of the policies that preceded the outcomes of the Third Reich were bad. The results speak for themselves.

Elizabeth Stice is a Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Her essays have appeared at Front Porch Republic, History News Network, and Mere Orthodoxy.