Ever since Trump first ran for president, a central theme among Democrats and the media has been that Trump is literally Hitler, and his supporters -- namely, Republicans -- are literally Nazis. This has gone viral in the 2024 campaign featuring the New Republic’s infamous cover showing Trump as Hitler, published only a week before the first assassination attempt against Trump in July.

As a historian who has done considerable writing and research into the history of the Third Reich, I think it’s time that someone who actually knows something about Hitler and Nazis to provide an assessment of these charges. I studied in Germany and for more than three decades I have spent many weeks in the German archives poring over documents of the Third Reich so I could write many books and academic articles on the Wehrmacht. The historians of the Bundeswehr’s History Office (authors of outstanding scholarship on the Third Reich) thought enough of my scholarship to commission me to author a chapter on Nazi war crimes in a book on 20th-century war crimes.

I will focus on the two months of February 1933 to late March 1933 during which the democratic Weimar system was destroyed and replaced by a one-party Nazi totalitarian state.

In January 1933, the German electorate was hopelessly split. Though the Nazis had taken a beating and had lost votes in the November 1932 election, it remained the largest political party in Germany, with 34% of the vote. Democracy-hating Nazis and Communists had just over half of the Reichstag delegates, making any coalition of democratic parties impossible.

On January 30, 1933, the senile and declining 85-year-old German President Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg was convinced by his handlers to allow Hitler to become German chancellor and to lead a coalition government. Leaders of major democratic political parties accepted this, naively thinking that Hitler could be controlled. Many of those party leaders would die or suffer imprisonment for their bad judgement. Germany prided itself on following the rule of law, and most democratic politicians could not imagine that the Nazis would turn on them.

On February 4, 1933, Hitler coaxed President von Hindenburg into approving new national elections for March 5. Hindenburg also granted Hitler special emergency powers to use the police and censor the press to keep order. Hitler intended to use these powers to win the election and make the Nazis the majority by any means necessary.

Throwing Out Election Laws

The key to controlling Germany, a federation of 39 states, was control of Prussia. The State of Prussia constituted over 60% of the German landmass as well as 60% of the total German population. The Nazis demanded that the government of Prussia should also call for a state election, to be held concurrently with the national election. Prussian law required the heads of both the chambers of the Prussian parliament, the Landtag, approve a new election. But the president of the upper chamber, Konrad Adenauer, the very popular mayor of Cologne and senior leader of the Center Party, refused to give his assent. This stymied the Nazi plans, so the Nazis simply declared that they could override the Prussian Constitution and called the election anyway.

Censorship

The emergency regulations allowed the Nazis to censor any media stories critical of them, and even to forcibly shut down opposition presses. At the same time, the Nazi press ramped up its own media campaign, hysterically describing moderate and democratic politicians like Adenauer as traitors and criminals while forbidding them from publishing any rebuttals.

Violence and Police Protection

Thanks to Chancellor Hitler, gangs of Nazi thugs from the SA were free to roam the streets and attack the opposition, while the police were stood down. Some prominent members of the democratic parties were brutally beaten by Nazi thugs. Konrad Adenauer, under open threats by the Nazis, requested police protection, which was denied. Adenauer was unable to go into his mayor’s office, which was staked out by Nazi gangs ready to maim or even kill him. In February and March 1933 Adenauer, a major political leader, literally lived in hiding. For good measure, the Nazis banned political rallies or meetings by opposition parties because they might provoke violence (the major purveyors of violence being the Nazis).

The Reichstag Fire as an Armed Insurrection

In the evening of February 27, 1933, the national legislature building, the Reichstag, burst into flames that were so intense that the Berlin fire department was helpless. Within hours, Chancellor Hitler declared that Germany was facing an armed insurrection by the communists and extracted from Hindenburg a more powerful decree giving Hitler dictatorial powers to control the police and the authority to do whatever it took to suppress the armed insurrection. The Nazis were organized and prepared for this and within two days over 4,000 people were arrested.

The armed insurrection was an insurrection without arms. The police found few weapons and the thousands of arrested insurrectionists were taken completely by surprise. This makes Nazi claims of saving Germany from imminent revolution rather dubious. However, there are other details about the Reichstag fire. The Nazis arrested a crazed Dutch communist who confessed to setting the Reichstag fire, but does not explain how the fire had spread so quickly. On the other hand, Hermann Goering, the president of the Reichstag and number two man in the Nazi Party, lived across the street from the Reichstag in his official residence and had full access to the building. At the Nuremberg Trials, General Franz Halder, former Army chief, testified that Göring had bragged to him in 1942 that he had arranged to burn down the Reichstag. Göring denied this at his trial, and the issue was dropped, as any witnesses were dead or missing.

Lawfare

Despite their control of the media and suppression of opposition parties, the Nazis again failed to win a majority. That was solved by simply declaring that all the communist votes (15%) were invalid, resulting in an instant Nazi majority. Immediately, all their opponents from the democratic parties, the Social Democrats, the Center Party, and Bavarian People’s Party, and German People’s Party were summarily thrown out of office as the Nazis took complete control of the national and state governments.

But gaming the election was not enough; the opposition leadership had to be completely destroyed. In late March, prominent democratic opposition leaders were arrested and charged with an array of phony charges, from tax evasion to malfeasance. The list of charges filed by the Nazis would make Merrick Garland proud. Konrad Adenauer was hit by a stack of criminal charges and was dismissed from office, his property and bank accounts seized so that he and his family were forced to live on charity from friends until the Nazis, figuring he was broken, dropped charges after four years and allowed him to retire. Fritz Schäffer, the finance minister of Bavaria and a key leader of the Bavarian People’s Party, was given the same treatment. Both would barely survive the Nazi era to lead a free and prosperous West Germany.

As an observant reader will note, from censorship to lawfare it’s the Democrat Party today -- not Republicans -- that has embraced the exact same methods as the Nazis to seize power. But there is so much more. The Democrat use of DEI as a mandatory race ideology is similar to Nazi racial ideology -- just change whites for Jews in DEI training and you get a good idea of what Nazi racial ideology was like. The current attacks on academic freedom in universities in America also give you a good idea of Nazi methods of 1933. But that’s for another article.

James S. Corum, Ph.D. is a military historian, author and co-author of 16 books, and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.

Image: Public Domain