Side-Quest: Thought Experiments with History

An essay on the complexities of morality and righteousness

Authors note: I wrote this post shortly following the attempted assassination of Trump, in an attempt to explain that hoping or cheering for such events, regardless of who the target is, does not bode well for any democracy; at the same time, I wanted to put “learning from history” into perspective, especially when it comes to some of the worst acts of evil ever committed.

Learning from history is far more challenging than we’d like to think.

I never posted it, in the end I was worried about the potential for misunderstandings. Now that some time has passed, I think it might be useful to finally share it.

Enjoy!

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Imagine yourself an average German, in February of 1933, barely a month away from Adolf Hitler achieving power. You have been transported there from the future, bringing with you the knowledge and hindsight of events to come.

How do you stop him?

I already know your first answer: shoot him, of course. Adolf Hitler must die. There is no alternative, he is simply too dangerous to be allowed to live. You proceed to dedicate every fibre of your being toward the singular objective of eliminating Hitler.

That would be the obvious response; and I would agree with you, knowing what savage and barbaric crimes he would go on to commit, and lead his country into committing. Any and all means for bringing the swiftest end to his project and his person are justified.

If we were to remove your knowledge and hindsight of those future events, but allow you to retain a conviction of the threat Hitler poses: does your answer change? Is it still essential to stop him with any means necessary? How much of what he has written and said about his plans can you take that seriously?

Until now, the crimes for which he will become infamous - to which "Hitler" and "Nazi" become bywords for the greatest evils known to humankind - have not been committed. Not yet. How certain can you be that they will be carried out?

Certain enough to risk setting a precedent for eliminating a political figure through violence? To bypass legal and constitutional norms by executing the head of the majority electoral party based on their mere possibility, or even probability of future crimes against humanity?

Let's make this a little easier. It's 1939, and Hitler is ready to launch his forces into an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country. He has already managed to absorb 2 other sovereign states of Europe, though without bloodshed. He might still pull back from the precipice here, too. How certain are you that violence is justified in eliminating him now, considering he hasn't yet committed the crime of aggressive war?

He changed the laws so that his every domestic act is technically sanctioned by it, regardless. His supremacy over the law had been certified post-facto following the summary roundups and executions on the Night of Long Knives.

Is it enough to justify acting? What about the threat of imminent war, is that enough justification?

We like to think we have the examples of history to protect us from repeating our worst mistakes. "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it."

Even if we study it with acute intensity, can we really be sure we would know an Adolf Hitler coming if we saw it?

Could we be doomed to repeat the mistakes of Weimar Germany and those later members of the 3rd Reich, who did not take their chances to stop him one way or another? Could we ever really be sure if the time had finally come, and that the cause was just?

Even if you were in a position to take Hitler alive and arrest him, and have him put on trial, that alone could have enormous consequences for the future of the democratic process. That's exactly the kind of thing that happens in so-called Banana Republics, when the democratically elected leader is ousted by a military Junta; sometimes with a show trial, sometimes not, but almost always ending democracy in that country by way of a firing squad.

If arrested, what crime could you charge him with? Once he has effectively placed himself above the law, not only through legislation but also through the appointment of sympathetic judges, on what legal basis could such an action possibly stand?

Lastly... what if you got it wrong? What if, in the end, those most evil crimes would not have been committed?

Such questions are only ever easy to answer in hindsight. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that had many of those people in a position to take action known for certain what was coming - and I don't mean having evidence for a prediction, I mean knowing with absolute inner certainty - they would have acted. Knowing, though: that's the hard part.

Even when you have the words coming from the horses own mouth on a regular basis, how seriously should you take those words? The risks of unintended consequences from political violence, no matter how noble the goal, can be grave indeed.

The entirely democratic seizure of power

In 1933, Adolf Hitler was assigned the task of forming a government by the President of the Republic, Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg. It was a result for which Hindenburg and almost all other political parties in the Weimar republic had been trying desperately to avoid, even risking a possible constitutional crisis.

The Nazis held a majority of the seats in the Reichstag, and had done so since July 1932. It wasn’t even all that close. The distance separating the Nazis and the next most populous party - the SPD - was a whopping 97 seats, or 16%. The Nazis held 230 seats in the Reichstag, a full 37% of them. The SPD only managed 133 seats, a meagre 21%.

The Nazis held an outright majority of constituencies across all of Germany. If their system had been similar to the US Electoral College, that July election would have been a landslide so complete it would have rivalled even Franklin Delano Roosevelt's greatest victories.

The election following that - in November 1932 - that majority shrunk, but only slightly, the distance narrowing to 13%; even so, both the Nazis and SPD had lost some seats. The SPD simply managed to lose fewer of them.

This majority did not mean the Nazis were entitled to form government, but it sure made it a challenge for any minority coalition government to function. Ultimately, it was up to the President of the Republic to bestow the mandate of forming a government. Whomever he chose would still require the support of a significant proportion of the Reichstag.

Worse still, somehow, the Nazis and the German Communist Party - the KPD - had begun cooperating around this time, not due to any sort of friendly feelings (the Nazis, you will remember, were ferociously and violently anti-Communist). It was a very temporary truce, and an alliance of convenience if there ever was one.

As the old saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, however briefly.

The KPD weren’t the ones barring Hitler’s way to power. They were a minority party, positioned 3rd behind the Nazis and SPD, with a total of 14% of seats after the July election (increasing to 16% after November). Together with the Nazis, though, they constituted just over half of all seats in the Reichstag, an absolute majority.

Momentarily, their political objectives converged: by disrupting the existing power structure, making it impossible for anyone to govern effectively, they would shake its foundations, hoping to expose new cracks and fissures that could then be exploited. The depression had forced Germany in particular to its knees, and for any young Democracy, the scale of the economic catastrophe had more than enough force to drive a steak through its beating heart.

The absurdist, almost dadaist alliance of the Nazis and the KPD allowed them to wield a constitutional weapon of great power: the Vote of No Confidence, enshrined in Article 54 of the Weimar constitution. With such a measure, they could sweep the legs out from under each and every minority coalition as and when it suited them, causing its immediate dissolution. Such motions required nothing more than a simple plurality of votes; a simple majority. With their combined 51% of seats, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them.

One by one, Chancellors were appointed, only to fall again in short order.

Eventually, Hindenburg and his confidants began to see writing on the wall. With the chaos wrought upon Parliament requiring the President to rule by decree, and his fast-failing health, no doubt they would have been uncertain how long they could keep this up.

This is when that infamous moment had arrived. One of Hindenburg’s most trusted allies, a favourite of the President and a recent Chancellor himself (who had also fallen to the dreaded No-Confidence vote), Franz von Papen had decided there were no further moves to make. They had tried to keep their enemies at arms length, only to have each arm sliced off in turn. Now, they figured, they only had one card left to play: they would attempt to co-opt the Nazi party and its hypnotic leader. They would dilute its radicalism, by offering Hitler the Chancellorship on the condition that he accepted a large cohort of moderate Conservatives into his cabinet.

Spoiler alert: it did not work.

Shortly after Hitler’s ascension, Hindenburg died, and the Nazis united the positions of Chancellor and President into the all-powerful Führer.

His seizure of power was entirely within constitutional guidelines, step by step by step.

There are those who question the idea that it was entirely democratic, suggesting that any system which was not identical to the American system could not possibly fit the definition of a Democracy. They expect that if one were to look up the word in a dictionary, they would find nothing but an image of Old Glory, the stars and bars.

“Ain’t no one elected him personally”, they’ll tell you; and it’s true, no German was able to vote for Hitler personally in the Reichstag elections, since he did not personally stand for those elections. They voted in enormous numbers for the representatives of his party, of which he was the leader and chief architect.

Every vote for the NSDAP was a vote for Hitler, and his appointment as Chancellor by Hindenburg was entirely within the rules.

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Since Germany’s surrender in 1945, every historian, political scientist, journalist, pundit, man, woman and child has - quite rightly - condemned the politicians of Weimar, the would-be coup leaders and plotters, and everyone else for failing to stop Hitler’s rise.

Even in that inter-war period, surely the Germans had no need for a fortune teller to state what seems to us to have been quite obvious: that Hitler presented a clear and present threat to German democracy, to its social and moral norms, to whole swathes of German citizens categorised as "racial enemies", and moreover, to the stability and territorial integrity of all European states, in particular those sharing a border with Germany herself.

He had boasted of it many times. He had written about the need for absolute dictatorship - the Leadership Principle, or Führerprinzip in Mein Kampf. In that utterly massive pile of pseudo-messianic, self-glorifying, hyper-racist psychobabble he vomited out from his typewriter while incarcerated at Lansberg prison, he describes repeatedly the shape of things to come in a National-Socialist "World Concept": that all Authority must be concentrated upwards, into the hands of singular men (and always men), who alone may choose to assign tasks to those under him and delegate portions of his absolute authority to underlings for the purposes of carrying out their designated tasks.

He essentially described a kind of Authoritarian Darwinian-Technocracy, whereby Leaders would not merely be appointed from above, nor elected from below, but would fight their way to the top by whatever means, demonstrating their expertise and fitness for the role. How exactly the leadership authority would be then bestowed upon such "Überpolitiker" was never made clear, however what was made clear: it would not be through any kind of democratic process.

He wrote about the need to seize territory and expand the borders of Germany herself, particularly towards the East. He was determined that only by such an undertaking could the German nation itself survive. On this point he was unequivocal. There was no middle ground to be had. Expansion - not colonialisation, but direct expansion of the mainland borders of Germany - was utterly indispensable to Hitler's worldview. There were few things more certain than that Hitler would attempt a significant Eastward expansion, at whatever cost.

He spewed the most insipid vitriol and ludicrous absurdist accusations upon the Jews, designating them as the ultimate enemy of not only Germans, but of all humankind. He accused a secret Jewish "Cabal" of having inserted a knife into Germany's back during the Great War, by inciting the overthrow of the Kaiser at the peak of the German Army's territorial dominance in Europe, and installing men of weakness and timidity who simply signed the nation's death warrant without question or complaint: or, in Hitler's repeated phrase, the "November Criminals".

These were merely the things he had written about: there was so much more that he spoke from his own mouth at party rallies and election campaigns. The same points were all continually re-enforced and made ever-more radical in every speech he gave - of which there were many, he loved the sound of his own voice. Despite committing himself to a legal takeover of power (following his failed attempt at a violent seizure of it), he stated in court that "heads will roll" under a National Socialist government. He saw it as his very destiny to remake the state in his image, of this there was no secret.

He meant every word of it.

Despite his utter seriousness, he was seen by his political opposition and foreign observers as no more than a clown. A remarkably effective demagogue and populist clown, yes, but a clown nonetheless. Nothing more than a rabble-rouser. Surely, they said to themselves, if he ever found himself in real power, the reality of governing a nation would land on him like a bucket of ice water and temper his radicalism.

I mean, just look at him: he had a ridiculous moustache, shouted ridiculous and unhinged nonsense, and repeated conspiracy theories so stupid and absurd they could do nought but boggle the mind of any rational being. These were rhetorical tactics, surely.

This was, in fact, the prevailing image of Hitler, both at home and abroad, for most of his political life prior to the seizure of power. In fact, it wasn't until he held total dominance over the state and its institutions, ruling with absolute power as the German Führer, that the wool began to fall from many pairs of eyes. Yet, even then, the seriousness of what was about to take place still did not properly register. Those that had discerned the coming storm by this point were few and far between, and most had taken the wise decision to run as far and as fast as they could, emigrating to places like Britain or the USA. Even among Jews in Germany, many were to continue to delude themselves with wishful thinking about the true intentions of this supreme Anti-Semite.

They would not be given much time at all to make up their minds. Within a year of taking the office of Chancellor, measures directly targeting Jews were already taking effect, and the frothing mobs of Brownshirts roamed free, inflicting abuse of all kinds with total immunity.

By now, there was no longer any "legal" or "legitimate" method of ousting Hitler. The old definitions of what was "legal" and "legitimate" as per the constitution were now dead.

The law would become a Nazi instrument, and it was wielded to its full effect. It was followed almost immediately by the German Army. Both would display slavish obedience to their Führer, right up until he put a bullet in his own brain in that Bunker in 1945.

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Every single book I have ever read on the subject of Hitler and the Nazis - a lot of them, believe me - has included some denunciation of the people who let slip their chances to take action. Over and over, we point to figures like Hindenburg, Papen, the German General Staff, and many others for failing to act with the requisite resolution to stop an obvious megalomaniac.

We tell ourselves that we've studied history, we know what such people look like, act like, and stink like. Surely, we tell ourselves, if such an individual does appear, saying similar things, making similar threats, launching into racist vitriol about foreigners taking every imaginable liberty (none of which is true), declaring themselves to be a coming dictator, declaring their intent to use the infrastructure of law and justice against their enemies, declaring an expansionist policy against neighbouring sovereign nations by force of arms if necessary, we would see them for what they were.

However, those of us that would truly oppose such demagogues must simultaneously wrestle with the question: how can we stop them, while maintaining the principles which are necessary to the society we seek to defend?

I am no expert in such questions. I am sure many others have done much better and more detailed research into them than I could ever hope to do. I am also radically opposed to political violence in all its forms.

Regardless, I wrestle with this question in my mind all the time: what would it take before we could be certain of the measures to stop a Hitlerian figure, should one ever rise to the pinnacle of democratic power?

The consequences of taking extreme measures can be catastrophic in their own right.