“If Fascism came to America, it would be on a program of Americanism.”
-Huey P. Long
Introduction
In 1932, Nazi party pioneer Dr. Albert Krebs wrote in his personal journal,
“My expulsion is directed against the German spirit of freedom of conscience. The Nazi party permits no one in its ranks who thinks independently and dares to express those thoughts. The Hamburger Tageblatt was practically the last Nazi newspaper which, disregarding the tactic of wooing certain economic circles, tried to express socialist views of Nazism. In the future that will now cease. The Nazi party has, in order to maintain the benevolence of business barons and reactionary cliques, thrown out one of its oldest members. That affects the party, not me. I remain what I was at the beginning of my political endeavors: a national socialist.”
The fascinating story of Dr. Krebs and countless other nationalist socialist dissenters has been easily forgotten; buried amongst dusty shelves of university libraries. Uncovering the narratives left behind by the early Nazi party followers is a precious find for someone interested in the study of leader and follower-ships. Nazi historian Sherman Allen introduces his English translation of the Dr. Kreb’s German journal to readers with these words:
“What is most important to understand is how the ultimate qualities of Nazism were implicit in its original ideas and methods. Thus, Dr. Krebs does the great service of reminding us that the early Nazis were not all freakish aberrations so totally foreign as to be comfortably discounted but fellow human beings with understandable aspirations who took a dreadfully wrong approach. Some were simply swine. Many others are more frightening because they were not monsters but men with whom we find at least a modicum of identity. On the basis of this recognition we can begin to sort out what made them go wrong.”
A. The Responsibility of Followers
I argue there are many continuities between the political times of Dr. Kreb’s early Nazi regime and our own. This brief essay zooms in on the Nazi Party followers and the middle class German citizenry, while temporarily relegating Hitler’s leadership role to the margins. Adolph Hitler was not appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933 simply because he had charisma. The German followers of the Nazi Party and the ‘average’ German people supported, funded and fueled Hitler’s fascist agenda. The volk (German folks) therefore were not mere victims as Hitler would have German history believe; they were also instigators as well as accomplices. They had a grave responsibility to stop Hitler as their leader, but they didn’t. Perhaps beyond a certain point, not even his intimate followers could stop him single-handedly. The purpose of analyzing German followers as legitimate players in the early stages of the Third Reich is to unravel how their actions, or lack of actions, impacted the virulency of the Holocaust? What can we as followers of the 2010 U.S. political system learn from their murderous oversight and behaviors? Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long advised fellow socialist followers to watch out for the U.S. hyper-nationalist, militant groups before being silently assasinated very early on his political career. Are we on the road to an American brand of fascism driven by “business barons and reactionary cliques?”
I compare the Nazi Party followers, like Dr. Krebs, of the 1930’s to the 2009-2010 followers of three groups from the Tea Party movement and draw three lessons. I compare followers of only three out the six Tea Party factions; 1.Tea Party Patriots, 2. FreedomWorks Tea Party, and 3. the 1776 Tea Party. The German “followers” here are defined as the volk; the middle class people who knew about the scapegoating of other Germans (specifically German Jews, communists, socialists, any political opposition and homosexuals), participated by being apathetic, choosing to remain blissfully ignorant of the human rights violations in their communities and/or agreed that the Nazi’s were justified to persecute those not purely Aryan. (Panayi, 2001) I analyze how the Tea Party’s followers platform of supporting an exclusively Christian, pro-corporate, free-market, small-government, and anti-Communist agenda backhandedly attracts some people that are either or xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic, misogynists and homophobes.
The year two-thousand and ten and something is very wrong with U.S. democracy for the diverse multitudes that are angry at the economic, social, and political status quo. Professor Lipman-Blumen asks that followers think, “Does the [party’s] vision turn evil into moral virtue or moral virtue into human weakness? Does the vision cloak evil in self sacrificial or virtous garb, like Henrich Himmler’s speech ‘thanking the members and leaders of the SS for shouldering the terrible but unaviodable task of exterminating millions of people?” Generally speaking, we as followers have a collective obligation to withdraw or give legitimacy to our system of governance. If we do not agree politically, then we must agree that using violence and hatred are not acceptable forms of communicating anger. I encourage the progressives to have tolerance for racist/anti-Semitic white people and the Tea Party followers to respect the humanity of people who are not similar to themselves. As novelist Chuck Palahniuk frankly sums it up, “you are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else and we are all part of the same compost pile.”
The idea of comparing the contemporary Tea Party followers with the Nazi Party followers came directly from the mouth of one well-known Tea Party’s spokesperson; Glen Beck. Beck flagrantly fetishizes the Nazis and the Nazi party during his television program on the Fox News Channel. According to the Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank who has been keeping count, Beck has mentioned Nazis or Nazism a brief two-hundred and two times from January 2009 (President Barak Obama’s inauguration) to June 2010. The Tea Party leadership and certain followers readily associate with the neo-Nazi movements and unabashingly embrace the cruelty of the historical Nazi Party. For example, in the last congressional elections, the GOP candidate for Ohio-9 and Tea Party favorite, Rich Iott, is also a Nazi SS Waffen re-enactor. (Rosenberg, 2010) Historical ties between groups that are advocating fascim, racial hatred in a corporate sponsored astroturf movement and extreme Christian militarism do not appear and then disappear overnight.
B. Brief Historical Timeline of the Nazi Party’s Ascendence to Political Dominance
(The Third Reich lasted in power from 1933 to 1945)
This timeline has information about unemployment, Nazi voting statistics, Hitler’s power consolidation, and the beginning of the crimewave against “enemies” of the German state.
*The Weimar Republic lasts from 1919-1933.
*1931-1932: An economic recession with nine million unemployed and a quarter of
those employed work less than full time.
*In the 1932 elections, fourteen million people voted for the Nazi Party.
*January 1933: Adolph Hitler is appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg.
*February 1933: the Reichstag Fire -A national state of emergency is declared.
*”After the March 11, 1933 elections, Hitler’s party was given over seventeen million
votes (43.9% of the electorate)…”
*The German ‘Miracle’ from 1933-1937: The unemployment levels are slashed
from six million to two million.
*June 1934, the Night of the Long Knives. Hitler’s opposition leaders were murdered while asleep in their beds.
*“In August 1934, thirty-eight million Germans (90% of registered voters) approved
Hitler’s own election to the party-state position of Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor
with full emergency powers. Only just over four million opposed him.”
*The Press Law passed in 1934 reversed the birthright of German citizenship for Jews.
*The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 effectively revoked civil rights and
human rights for Jews.
*In 1938, labor shortages emerge.
*November 1938: seven thousand synagoges burned down at the same time in Berlin.
*October 1942: The deporations of German Jews to concentration camps begin.
C. Brief Timeline of the U.S. Tea Party’s Movement’s Ascendence Towards Political Notoriety
(The Rise of the Tea Party Movement in 2009 to the Present)
This timeline displays information regarding official unemployment statistics, Tea Party voting figures, Tea Party mobilization and legislation.
*October 26, 2001: The USA Patriot Act (HR 3162) was passed to help stop “terrorism.”
*2008: The official unemployment rate is averaging at 6.1%
*January 20, 2009: President Barak Obama is inaugurated.
* The nationwide Tea Party Coalition is founded on February 20, 2009. The 1776 Tea Party Patriots become officially established.
*The FreedomWorks Tea Party is formalized: February 27, 2009.
*Tea Party Patriots are founded on March 10, 2009.
*April 2009: Bill H.R.1868 is introduced to the House of Representatives by a Tea Party affliated legislator. It seeks to end birthright citizenship by overturning the 14th Amendment.
*The September 12, 2009 “Take America Back” March on Washington lead by
demagogue Glen Beck.
*The 2009 Official unemployment rate on average was 9.3%. More than fourteen
million U.S. citizens without work.
*2009: Membership of the Tea Party National Coalition (all 6 branches) is 16- 18% of the adult population with millions of sympathizers.
*April 2010: Arizona’s Bill SB 1070 is signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer.
Local police are to enforce national immigration law through racial profiling of the Latino community. It is currently being contested in the court system.
*August 28, 2010: The Tea Party rally “Restoring Honor,” was lead by unabashed anti-Semite, Racist, and Sexist spokesperson Glen Beck on the same day/place as the Anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have A Dream Speech.’ Civil Rights activist Al Sharpton holds a counter-rally on the same day.
*October 2010: The unemployment rate is at 9.6% Fifteen million are unemployed.
*October 21, 2010: A Wall Street Journal poll found that the Tea Party attracts more than 35% of adult voters.
*November 30, 2010: Unemployment rose to 9.8%
Lesson #1: Beware of the “State of Emergency” Legislation and the Legalization of Systematic Murder
The greatest irony of Hitler’s political takeover is that he used the democratic process provided through the Weimar Constitution to dismantle the Weimar Republic and establish his dictatorship. By declaring a “State of Emergency,” Hitler gained additional support from certain factions of the German public after his appointment as Chancellor. (Berghoff, 2001; McGowan, 2001; Panayi, 2001) The people’s beloved Fuhrer schemed a plan that set afire the German Reichstag , then having successfully blamed a scapegoat (the mythical Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy), he declared a state of emergency and further consolidated his political power. Hitler shouted ‘fire’ to alert of a national crisis, but he started the fire; not the Jews. The epicenter of the anti-Semitic hatred may have begun arguably at Hitler’s policy table nevertheless, it extended through a noteworthy fraction of civilians at the street level. (Berghoff, 2001; Gellately, 2001) Hartmut Berghoff clarifies, “Nazism was rooted in crisis, and its whole system of politics was geared, in effect, to the maintenance of crisis as a permanent state.”
The Reichstag Fire Decree assured the Jews that they would be taken into “protective custody” by the Gestapo (German police) to keep them “safe” from the raging agitation of the “general” populace. In practice “protective custody” functioned as one of the initial steps on the path to systematic genocide. The deceptive, sugar-coated rhetoric as a measure of public safety legitimized the arrests and deportation measures. Berghoff explains, “As Germans watched these events unfold they believed that the communists had attempted to seize power illegally.” The overall populace may have not been sure of what was transpiring at the beginning, yet the Nazi’s were obviously buckling tightly against certain minority groups of society. Despite the initial confusion, numerous Nazi party followers remained apathetic and/or expressed their hatred outright advocating extermination for those deemed not part of the Aryan-only German volk. After the bloody crackdown upon Jews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Communists, homosexuals, and foreign workers escalated, there was hardly any coordinated opposition. On the infamous “Night of the Long Knives,” Hitler ordered his subordinates to murder the opposition party leaders; a mission they carried out sucessfully.
It was not a secret that the Nazi’s were virulently Judeophobic underneath the thin guise of maintaing law and order in a state of crisis. Those nationalist socialistswho did not agree with the direction the Nazi movement took for example Dr. Krebs, were weeded out the party ranks early on. The Press Law of 1934 rescinded the 1914 Law of Naturalization that gave Jews born in Germany full citizenship. The Nuremberg Laws passed in 1935 legally made Jews less than fully equal to Germans by forbidding inter-marriage, confiscated property, and called for further boycotts/attacks upon Jewish businesses. Under the cut-throat punitive state of emergency legislation, corruption was engendered within the society. Crimes of opportunism rose dramatically. Anyone with a grudge against a family member, neighbor, or co-worker had the opportunity to send the police to fulfill their personal vendettas. Inevitably, nepotism became widespread. Gellately found in his research that the Gestapo depended primarily on the denunciations of the public to go after the ‘traitors’ in their home front. “In fact the Gestapo tended to be reactive and waited for information…most of it came from ‘ordinary’ Germans, that is, civilians who were not even members of the Nazi Party.”
As followers, we all have a civic responsibility to learn from toxicity of Nazi Party followers. Most recently Tea Party followers, and certain conservative extremist groups agreeing with their core beliefs but aren’t card carrying members, have visibly espoused, racism, xenophobia and sexism within their ranks. (IREHR, 2010) The state of emergency rhetoric that justified the Reichstag Fire Decree sounds like the “War on Terror” legislation passed by the George W. Bush Administration after September 11, 2001. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, overwhelmingly approved in the House and the Senate, rescinded many civil rights of Muslim Americans, in addition to Middle Eastern migrants, Mexican migrants, other minority groups, and vulnerable people. In the name of public safety, those deemed ‘terrorists’ and ‘illegal aliens’ are being systematically detained, deported and sometimes tortured, killed. Is American “democracy” becoming disabled by fearmongering and a false political crisis ?
Like the Press Law redefined German citizenship in 1934, the Tea Party supporters of the bill H.R. 1868 are attempting to nullify the birthright provision of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in an effort to legally redefine the concept of U.S. citizenship to exclude Mexican migrant’s children born here. While tempting to be seduced by the tale of a likely social scapegoat, it is utmost important to ask tough questions about the validity of a Jewish–Bolshevik or Muslim-Terrorist or Mexican-immigrant take-over. In the 2010 report Tea Party Nationalism, independent researchers, Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind, for the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights elaborate on the specific type of U.S. nationalist brand the extreme fringes of the Tea Party followers have internalized.
“It is a [U.S.] nationalism that excludes those deemed not to be ‘real Americans’; including the native-born children of undocumented immigrants (often despised as ‘anchor babies’), socialists, Moslems, and those not deemed to fit with a ‘Christian nation.’ The ‘common welfare’ of the constitution’s preamble doesn’t complicate their ideas about individual liberty… a bright white line of racism threads through this nationalism...It is inchoate as it is super-patriotic. It is possibly an embryo of what it might yet become.”
Indeed. The Republican party has a dark history of courting former Nazi’s and recruited other white supremacist militants into its ranks. This well-documented alliance may not come as a surprise for many highly media literate followers. (Russ, 1991; Rosenberg , 2010). As investigative journalist Paul Rosenberg reveals,
“The last thing that current-day resentment cheerleaders-from [Glen] Beck on down-want is for folks to start poking into the past, and laying out exactly how they (not liberals) are the ones with specific, historical connections with Nazi Germany, and the greatest death panels of all time.”
Lesson #2: Resist Social Darwinism; Oppose Racism, Anti-Semetisim, Sexism, Homophobia and Xenophobia
The Nazi obsession with ethnic and racial purity of the body politik led to deadly consequences against those deemed impure. The final solution, endlossung,to the great problems of Germany could be solved if only the ‘vermon’ or ‘parasites’ (as Hitler referred to the Jews) that plagued society were to be eradicated. Lee McGowen pens, “Nazi propaganda proclaimed the superiority of the German race and its right to rule while, in contrast, it condemned ‘inferior’ peoples to a state of enslavement and drudgery or even extermination.” Clearly, unpacking the myth of racial purity is key to unraveling what type of thinking lead to the atrocities of genocide and the Holocaust. Why did the Nazi followers believe this illogical hatred so profoundly? Panikos Panayi suggests the mass media propaganda, the intensity of the repressive circumstances, and a dramatically reduced unemployment rate all contributed to the legitimacy of the Furher’s party.
Another particularly powerful reason had to do with the language used to justify scientific racism as based ‘objectively’ in human biology and nature. Social Darwinism holds the fallacious impression that people who are more fit to ‘survive’ will do so and reproduce. This view is racist and wrong, but it tempts powerless people to narcissistically categorize themselves as the racially superior while simultaneously degrading those not like them to a subhuman status. Even blonde and blue eyed German citizens born with physical disabilities, genetic disorders and psychological impairments were stolen or willingly handed over to the Nazi’s to be euthanized, murdered or worse, used as guinea pigs in live experiments. (Panikos, 2001; Gellately, 2001)
As the Nazi party’s political power increased, more and more ‘average’ Germans were accosted, deported and killed for minor transgressions. The main problem with the law and order system of Social Darwinism is as professor of Leadership Studies, Jean Lipman-Blumen foresees, “If the leader/savior destroys your enemy…what are the guarantees that those same destructive forces will not be turned next against those who are…your family and ultimately you?” This myth of scientific racism ,that justifies dehumanization when enforced by law, must be rebuked for the safety of the party followers themselves.
Tea Party followers would be wise to disassociate themselves from that type of barbaric ideology that relies on differentiating people based on socially constructed categories like ‘legal’ versus illegal,’ white versus color, man versus woman, heterosexual versus homosexual .The “Restore Honor” and “Take America Back” rallies led by charlatan Beck rings clearly of the Nazi infatuation with the concept of endlossung. The neo-Nazi movement’s slogan “Nation is Race” isn’t ambigious about its problematic definition of U.S. nationalism. The “us” versus “them” differentiation isn’t a sidenote to the Tea Party followers that self-identify as white supremacists; the movement’s agenda is to completely eradicate the other.
Lesson #3: Beware of the Demands for Grossraum (Economic Space) and of Corporate Funding
Grossraum translates from its Nazi ideological context to mean the symbolic and literal economic space Aryan people deserve because of their white supremacy. It means the non-white others need to be uprooted and removed to satisfy the growth process of the privileged white minority. The anti-democratic proposition of economic space harkens back to the Nazi party followers but also to the contemporary Republican party followers in the United States. The “Take America Back” rally hosted by the Tea Party displays an American adaptation to the concept of grossraum. The enemies Glen Beck sees are not the greedy corporate sponsors of the Tea Party (like his boss, Rupert Murdoch) that have infiltrated their ranks.
Economist Paul Krugman regards the Tea Party national coalitions as an ‘astroturf’ movement meaning the outward appearance of the group is grassroots but behind closed doors, the party is administrated by corporate elites like David and Charles Koch and Rupert Murdoch . Dr. Krebs warned the early Nazi party about the dangers of “wooing certain economic circles.” The money trail leading out the back door of the Nazi Party can explain who backed Hitler’s economic expenses. Who Financed Hitler, indicates that “[Martin] Black represented a secret group of twelve Ruhr industrialists called the Ruhrlade, ‘the most powerful secret organization of big business that existed during the Weimar period [before the Nazi take-over]. The Ruhrlade and Martin Blank became committed to funding the rise” of the Nazi party. Some German big businesses funded Hitler because in a Hobbesian sense, they felt entitled to pursue their best self-interest at the cost of millions of innocent lives. Many other German businesses and even transnational corporations profitted greatly from the free slave labor of the concentration camps, and by mass producing war time goods. These businesses include Siemens, AEG, Vereinigle Stahlwerke, Krupp, GHH, Daimler-Benz, and IG Farben. (Tooze, 2001; Panayi, 2001)
Regulating the interests big business inside private party politics is critical for the success of the party followers. The corporate idea of grossraum conveniently accommodates racists, anti-Semites, and xenophobes because it builds on contemporary neoliberal ideologies that personally enrich corporation owners at the expense of the most vulnerable sections of the population. Progressive investigative reporter Adele Stan briefs Alternet.org readers about the “Tea Party Inc.; The Big Money and Powerful Elites Behind the Right Wing’s Latest Uprising.”
But by 2009, with the collapse of the economy and the election of the nation’s first African-American president, the suppy chain of rage was complete, and the Tea Party came roaring to life. Rupert Murdoch gave the new movement legitimacy by means of sympathetic columns in the the Wall Street Journal, boosterism from Sean Hannity and Glen Beck and a regular media platform on Fox News Channel for Tea Party personalities and candidates.”
The first “non-negotiable” core belief on the list of the teaparty.org website is “Illegal aliens are here illegally.” The recent immigration law SB 1070 was wildly popular amongst some Tea Party followers. Grossraum is unmistakably embedded within this piece of legislation. SB 1070 harkens back to the Nuremberg laws passed for the deportation and detention practices under the guise of law and order. Although still being contested in court, the law would require local law enforcement officers to verify and uphold national immigration policies through racial profiling. The Latino migrants living in Arizona unable to prove “legality” are then instantly arrested in detention centers and inhumanely deported. The other name for SB 1070 is inappropriately “Support our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” cleverly disguising the private prison industry’s agenda of detaining migrants, including women and children, for a huge profit. Well intentioned followers, be weary of blindly accepting policies that demand the forced removal of politically debilitated populations to make room for ‘real’ Americans. Ted Rall’s newest work invites us to seriously consider what is at stake when we followers do not act before it’s too late to stop the atrocities against fellow human beings against that cannot politically defend themselves. Rall warns, “Once you commit yourself to apathy, laziness, and tacit consent to mass murder and rampant injustice, your miserable, wasteful choice can end only with death.”
Conclusion
On August of 1934, Dr. Albert Krebs wrote in his journal,
“We [national socialists] were all strongly opposed to collaboration with the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie’ of the right-wing parties... My colleagues feared a ‘watering down of the goal’ through the infiltration of reactionary attitudes formed spiritual fact that the party and its leaders were going to turn into a political and constitutional reality…But above all I could not longer visualize or accept the Nazi party as the instrument, nor its leadership with Hitler at the head, as the honest servants of this ‘goal,’ whether the goal was clear or not. I saw only a power bloc consisting of and driven by idealistic and demonic forces.”
Like Dr. Krebs, we must ask ourselves, are we being driven by ‘idealistic and demonic forces’ even if they may have originally promised insightful change? Leadership Studies scholar Ronald Heifetz writes, “the accumulation of evil never resides in one person at the top because no one gets to the top without representing the interests of the dominant factions in the system.” The leader (Hitler) that reduced unemployment from six million to one million within a five-year span increased his control of the state apparatus through overwhelmingly popular support. In fact, the Nazi’s public relations division was incredibly important to the regime’s rapid censure of the German state’s resources, institutions and public opinion (for example, the police, military, public funds/taxes, property, legal instruments) for without a willing constituency, Hitler’s agenda was unattainable. Why does it matter in the short/long run if we are not cautious about keeping an eye on our own barbaric political hatred and biases? Contemporary followers, both progressives or Tea Party followers, must be watchful of charismatic leaders that promise to restore prosperity to some at the expense of the less powerful.
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