The Last Election: Then and Now
The Nazis brutalized their opponents to win the 1933 Reichstag elections and cement Hitler's power. It was all legal. In November don't be surprised to see the same thing.
Nothing was a secret. All was lawful. And newspapers printed the story. What happened to the Weimar Republic 93 years ago is worth contemplating. The attack on its democracy played out in public just like what’s happening now.
Take The New York Times on February 16. 1933. Amidst the Reichstag election called by the new chancellor Adolph Hitler, the Times’ European chief reported, Hermann Goering—the state of Prussia’s acting Interior Minister, Hitler’s Minister without Portfolio and his right hand—had assembled its provincial governors two days before.
Prussia, Germany’s largest state, comprised two-thirds of the Reich making events there crucially important. Goering’s orders to the provincial governors: Nazi Storm Troopers, not police, would handle election campaign demonstrations as well as political meetings. Naturally, as auxiliary cops, the Storm Troopers would be armed.
The police, Goering said, would not be unemployed. Screened to assure Nazi sympathies, ‘special’ detectives would attend opposition party meetings, dissolving them if criticism of the government arose. Under a new press law, newspapers, especially on the left and in the center, could expect no less if they transgressed.
That wasn’t all. Campaign demonstrations by the Communists, the Nazis’ leading foes, were forbidden. The police, meanwhile, were to coordinate law enforcement actions with the Nazi Party, especially in Communist districts where violent clashes between the two political enemies at marches and rallies were a given.
No governor dissented. After all, seven of Prussia’s eleven were Nazi Party members. Nor did the police. Since January when Hitler became chancellor, 24 of Prussia’s 35 police chiefs had been axed, the rest in queue awaiting replacement by Nazis or their allies. It was, the New York Times Friedrich Birchall wrote, “a wholesale clean out.”
Two months later, Dorothy Thompson, one of the era’s extraordinary journalists, wrote in the Saturday Evening Post about the election. She described how Hitler used the law to crush his opponents, especially after the Reichstag fire on February 27. The arson was a Communist plot, Hitler declared next day, with more mayhem to come.
Hitler demanded the cabinet approve an emergency decree. As historian Thomas Rybeck, a scholar of the period, described in the Atlantic last year, the new writ magnified his power, not only to intimidate and arrest, but also to ignore the courts. Thompson’s first-hand reporting gives a vivid view of what happened in the streets.
“The entire opposition press was muzzled, and for much of the time suppressed,” she wrote. “(Hitler’s) private army, the SA troops, and their picked division…the SS men, broke up opposition meetings, terrorized the streets, staged rows, beat up Social Democratic deputies, and even assaulted leading Catholics.”
Thompson saw more in Hitler’s rise than simply the success of the Nazis’ legalized brutality. Returning to America in May, she told the New York Times that the German conservatives who helped put Hitler in power fatally misjudged their ability to control him. For Thompson, however, the failures of Hitler’s opponents mattered as well.
A few days after the election, Thompson wrote to her husband, the novelist Sinclair Lewis, troubled by the reaction to the Nazis abroad as well as in Germany. “Most discouraging of all is not only the defenselessness of the liberals but their incredible docility,” she told Lewis. “There are no martyrs for the cause of democracy.”
Thompson’s Saturday Evening Post article in May summed up. “There never were such elections in a modern western state.” The question, of course, is obvious. If Thompson were here today reporting on Trump 2.0, what would she say about current events and the midterm elections to come?
Take the new chancellor’s first few months in office and the law. Awaiting his turn with the hangman at Nuremberg in October 1946 for his war crimes as occupied Poland’s governor general, Hans Frank, Hitler’s one-time personal lawyer and legal strategist, explained that the Führer had an uncanny capacity.
Hitler could sense “the potential weakness inherent in every formal form of law,” Frank said, and then ruthlessly exploit it. In fact, as Rybeck describes, as the election unfolded, Hitler directed a regime that targeted “the Weimar Republic’s key democratic pillars: free speech, due process, public referendum, and states’ rights.”
The results of the March 1933 elections gave Hitler a Reichstag contingent that spared no time cementing his grip. Nazi control spelled the end of Weimar’s democracy. Two weeks later, the legislature passed the Enabling Act allowing Hitler to ban all other parties, turn the Reichstag into a rubber stamp, and rule by decree.
Writing in The Nation last month, Richard Gephardt and Tim Worth, the former Democratic Party House majority leader and Colorado’s former US House member and US senator respectively, see portents not unlike Germany’s 20th Century events. The two draw no historical parallels with Hitler’s rise but they’re impossible to miss.
From multi-billion dollar plus-ups in ICE agents, their operations, and detention camps and intelligence investigations into Antifa and other mythical internal security threats to Trump’s heads-up to US generals to prepare to face the enemy within, the co-authors write, Trump is building the infrastructure of authoritarian control.
Trump’s words and actions, they conclude, comprise “the methodical construction of an apparatus…to identify, arrest, prosecute, and if necessary forcibly suppress Americans whose only offense is opposition to this administration, by an executive who has openly declared that opposition itself is the enemy.”
Gephardt and Worth don’t explore explicitly threats to the midterm elections, but their warning leaves no doubt: Trump’s presidential decrees, investigations, and denunciations of his opponents’ alleged illegalities are putting the outcome in November in his crosshairs.
His legal assault defines the battlefronts. Reuters has identified 31 states where federal officials are suing to gain access to voter rolls and another eight where they’re seeking to interfere in election administration. According to NBC, 16 states have willingly complied with the Justice Department, while some two dozen are litigating.
So far, judges have dismissed nine of the 31 suits for access to voter data. Two weeks ago, judges issued five rulings to shortstop Trump’s decrees to vet voter lists, block mail-in voting, and check voters’ citizenship at the polls. Last Monday, the Supreme Court nixed his prohibition on counting mail-in ballots not received by election day.
That said, for those taking comfort in the law, court actions are one thing, Trump’s compliance another. The comments of the Attorney General nominee made the point. Speaking at a conservative political conference in March, then deputy AG Todd Blanche asked, “Why is there an objection to sending ICE to polling stations?”
In May Trump made Blanche’s rhetorical question categorical. Answering a reporter who asked about the possibility of ICE deployments on election day, Trump responded, “I’ll do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections.” The facts suggest it’s an answer to be taken to heart.
Trump’s use of FBI investigations, expansion of Homeland Security’s election-related role, and unprecedented focus of national intelligence authorities on domestic political targets should make his intentions clear. Indeed, federal officials have ample room to act on his diktats or respond to new ones, before, on, or after election day.
Is election fraud—phony mail-in ballots, illegal immigrants at the polls, or malware-manipulated voting machines—widespread, chronic and consequential? Consider the data on illegal immigrants allegedly in the voting lines and mailboxes stuffed with bogus ballots.
A 2016 election study by the Brennan Center for Justice found an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen votes out of 23.5 million ballots cast. That’s roughly 0.0001 percent of the vote.
As for mail voting fraud, research by the Brookings Institution found even less.
In the final analysis, when it comes to elections, if she were here Dorothy Thompson doubtless wouldn’t miss a simple fact. Like the Nazis’ unrelenting propaganda that helped bring them into power a century ago, Trump’s assault on the democratic process is based on a lie.
That American voting is corrupted by plots, malfeasance, and illegalities are the lies’ mendacious scaffolding supporting not only Trump’s authoritarian construction project but also his assault on the democratic process via executive orders, subpoenas, investigations and suits.
“Why don’t more Americans get it?” Gephardt and Wirth ask. In addressing Trump’s efforts to grow his authoritarian executive powers, the two have an answer.
“Because each step has been incremental. Each has been framed in the legitimate-sounding language of national security or law enforcement. Each was paired with a reassuring denial: We are not deploying the military domestically; we are not declaring an emergency over elections; we are not coming for citizens.”
The former congressman and senator have a solution as well.
Congress must reassert its authority, especially over misuse of presidential emergency powers. Governors and state attorneys general must protect lawyers, citizens, nonprofits, and election workers from bogus legal assaults. And news media must report, as the co-authors style it, the architecture of Trump’s rolling-coup as a single big picture story.
Americans, Gephardt and Wirth write, also must call out the lies by name by name. When it came to Germany’s fate 93 years ago, Dorothy Thompson was a pessimist on that score. As she wrote Sinclair Lewis, “There are no martyrs for the cause of democracy.”
Today, let’s hope she was wrong.