In January a 13-year-old boy in the northeast of Brazil caused an uproar by attending a graduation ball in Nazi uniform. The family unconvincingly tried to say the boy didn’t understand the gravity of his actions.
Around the same time, a Brazilian study showed that just 59% of Brazilians had heard of the Holocaust, while 53% could correctly describe it. Only 38.5% of those interviewed knew that Auschwitz-Birkenau was a Nazi extermination camp.
The incident surrounding the boy is indicative of the increasing amnesia about the horrors of the Nazi regime — in particular, how it came about and the risks that poses for democracy. That’s especially so in Brazil, a country which has its dreadful history of dictatorship and recently teetered close to a return to authoritarianism but for a forceful and principled judiciary.
During a recent return visit to the Topography of Terror Museum in a freezing Berlin, reading about the rise to power of the Nazis against the backdrop of the remnants of the Berlin Wall, the similarities with what we’re seeing in present-day America are scary.
We often read social media posts or hear people commenting that the US is living through what Germany went through in 1933, when the Nazis came to power, but without ever pointing out the similarities. I want to set this straight.
Although the rise of Nazism is far too complex to explore comprehensively in an article like this, five things stand out.
First, Germany was on the brink in 1932. Its economy had been crippled by the provisions of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which sent the bill for World War I to Germany, and then the 1929 stock market crash dealt it a death blow.
However, the end of World War 1 also resulted in Germany becoming a constitutional democracy through the creation of the informally named Weimar Republic, which was deeply unpopular among the German right wing. In fact, when the Nazis tried to get into the Reichstag in 1928 (and achieved marginal parliamentary representation), Joseph Goebbels said: “We are entering the Reichstag in order to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its own arsenal. We will become Reichstag deputies in order to paralyse the Weimar ideology with its own support.”
Collapsed from within
In other words, the Nazis did not want to take part in democracy, their purpose was to dismantle it from within. After rising to power in 1933 the Nazis kept their word through the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties, and the Enabling Act that suspended democracy altogether, allowing Hitler to rule without the Reichstag.
The judiciary in Germany at the time was far weaker and less independent than today. Many judges championed the Führer and his policies, so there were no effective check and balances on Hitler’s power. In any event, both laws were within the ambit of the Weimar constitution to deal with emergencies and had been used before the Nazis came to power. The Nazis simply exploited this normalisation.
Second, corruption and the 1929 stock market crash wreaked havoc on ordinary Germans. Along came Adolph Hitler promising to make Germany great again. As the Oxford professor Eric Dodds wrote in 1965, “in an age of anxiety any ‘totalist’ creed exerts a power attraction; one only has to think of the appeal of communism to many bewildered minds in our own day”. Before 1929, the Nazis battled to make any progress, but the general distrust in politics threafter provided the totalist attraction that the Nazis needed to conquer the Germans.
Third, during the 1920s the Nazis took control of the SS and the Sturmabteilung (SA), the infamous brownshirts who were ultimately sidelined after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The SA was central to the Nazi campaign of intimidation long before they came to power. The SS and the SA, and the Gestapo that was created in 1933, were used to arrest and terrorise their opponents, and with no civil rights left it all went unchecked.
Fourth, the expulsion, rounding up and ultimate extermination of Jews, foreigners, mentally ill people, Roma people, other minorities, and even Christian minorities such as Jehovah’s Witnesses — all while holding the Germans up as the superior race that should rightly look down on others — also contributed to the zeitgeist of hatred.
Fifth, spreading lies and dangerous mischaracterisations about opponents.
Troubling similarities
While one cannot say that the US is on track to become a similarly authoritarian state, there are troubling similarities that cannot be ignored. Through his executive orders Donald Trump is in effect ruling without Congress (as Hitler did through the Enabling Act). A recent New York Times analysis tracked how Trump-appointed judges give him an almost free pass on all his actions.
The US Supreme Court decision of Trump v US of July 1 2024, which ruled that a president has absolute immunity for core constitutional acts, presumptive immunity for official acts and no immunity for unofficial acts, coupled with the emasculation of big law firms, means that the rule of law in the US is looking shaky and under serious threat, all without suspending its constitution.
Trump has successfully convinced his supporters that the US is on the brink of collapse, like Germany in 1932, and that it needs him to restore the country to some imagined past glory. However, whereas Germany was legitimately in the doldrums, the US is not. But facts and the truth matter little to authoritarians and their flock. Convincing his supporters that they are facing erasure, regardless of reality, is all that is required.
Fundamental questions have been raised about the length of training and quality of Trump’s Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency troopers. The terror they are sowing among foreigners (including legal immigrants) and US citizens is nothing but a modern-day replica of the SA beating up undesirables in 1933 Germany.
The vitriol that Trump and his acolytes spread about minorities, Latinos, brown and black people sounds eerily similar to the hatred the Nazis spread about those they regarded as inferior humans. It didn’t take long in Nazi Germany for the hatred to concretise into violence against those deemed inferior. ICE’s violent actions and killing two US citizens standing up against actions of dubious legality are also strikingly similar to what the SA and SS did to “others”.
Trump’s social media posts often echo white supremacist ideas and refer to neo-Nazi literature. These are just some of the similarities between present-day Washington and 1933 Berlin. The Republican-dominated Senate and Congress, the subservient US judiciary (with notable exceptions) and a legal profession apparently too scared to act so as not to affect fee earnings, all mean there is little that keeps Trump’s authoritarian actions in check.
The only hope is that the midterm elections in November will bring some sense back to the US. If the democrats can gain control of one or both houses on the Capitol, this might provide an effective counterweight to Trump’s excesses.
• Myburgh is an attorney practising in Johannesburg and São Paulo.
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