Benjamin Carter Hett > Quotes

“The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The crisis and deadlock of 1932 and early 1933, to which Hitler appeared as the only solution, was manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude more than half the population from political representation and refused even the mildest compromise.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The cynical dishonesty of the Nazis’ propaganda received a significant boost from the cult of irrationality that drove their followers: the contempt for, indeed the revolution against, Enlightenment standards of rationality.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Alongside the viciousness of much of German politics in the Weimar years was an incongruous innocence: few people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought. When he became chancellor nonetheless, millions expected his time in office to be short and ineffectual. Germany was a notoriously law-abiding as well as cultured land. How could a German government systematically brutalize its own people? German Jews were highly assimilated and patriotic. Many refused to leave their homeland, even as things got worse and worse. "I am German and am waiting for the Germans to come back; they have gone to ground somewhere," Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary--he was the son of a rabbi and a veteran of the First World War who chose to stay, and miraculously survived.

Few Germans in 1933 could imagine Treblinka or Auschwitz, the mass shootings of Babi Yar or the death marches of the last months of the Second World War. It is hard to blame them for not foreseeing the unthinkable. Yet their innocence failed them, and they were catastrophically wrong about their future. We who come later have one advantage over them: we have their example before us.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise To Power

“Few members of Weimar’s insurgent groups wanted a lawless and barbaric dictatorship ruled over by someone like Hitler. They simply wanted the fastest and easiest solutions to their own particular problems,”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“noted American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said that, to be safe, laws must be drafted with the “bad man” in mind, not the good.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Across Europe, fascism developed only in advanced democracies where the socialist left had become successful enough to frighten the middle classes. Fascism was in part a defensive reaction against the left by those who most feared it.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Since there were no positive answers to any social problems, Nazism could only be against everything, even against inconsistent things: it was antiliberal and anticonservative, antireligious and anti-atheist, anticapitalist and antisocialist, and most of all antisemitic.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Autarky was central to the Nazis’ political campaigns, and the theme of freeing Germany from its dependence on a hostile world clearly struck a chord with voters. The canny party propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1932 that a nation that couldn’t manage to get control over the “necessary space, natural forces and natural resources for its material life” would inevitably “fall into dependence on foreign countries and lose its freedom.” The outcome of the First World War and the nature of the postwar world had proven this clearly, he claimed. “Thus a thick wall around Germany?” he asked. “Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world. Hitler himself, in the words of his biographer Joachim Fest, was “always thinking the unthinkable,” and “in his statements an element of bitter refusal to submit to reality invariably emerged.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“people could imagine the worst possibilities. A civilized nation could not possibly vote for Hitler, some had thought.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Nazism had succeeded not because people believed its messages, but in spite of the fact that they did not.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Similarly, judges, lawyers, and the law were among the things Hitler most despised, and his regime was one long assault on the rationality, predictability, and integrity of the law.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Nazi ideology was an answer to every dimension of Germany’s vulnerability to the world. Some of this the Nazis spelled out clearly at the time, and it contributed to their popularity. Some of it they only hinted at, or they did not explain the full implications of what they planned to do. Their commitment to withdrawing from the world economy, from trade deals, and from all the financial arrangements that were part of the gold standard, was explicit. As early as the Twenty-Five Points, the Nazis had been clear that noncitizens, including refugees and all Jews, could not count on remaining in Germany after a Nazi takeover or on having any political or civil rights. Even before 1933, the Nazis’ paramilitary forces were deploying themselves covertly for defense of the eastern border. The Nazis left no doubt at all that they would ban the Communist Party and that all Communist activists would be subject to arrest, or worse.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“millions of Germans believing a particular narrative about the war not because it was demonstrably true, but because it was emotionally necessary.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Hitler pulled all this together—the deliberate dishonesty, the concern with public irrationality, and yet also the desire to revel in this irrationality”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The Weimar Republic seethed with other resentments and hatreds: the German people were bitterly divided along every conceivable line. Rural people disliked the big cities for breaking with traditions of religion and sexual identity and morality. A postwar tide of refugees, particularly from eastern Europe, alarmed millions of Germans. German Catholics and Protestants had distrusted one another since the Reformation. The stresses of war and revolution had exacerbated antisemitism in both Christian groupings. Eventually, these different grievances coalesced, especially among the numerically dominant Protestants: Weimar was too Jewish, too Catholic, too modern, too urban—all in all, too morally degenerate.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The whole National Socialist agitation,” he continued, “is a constant appeal to the inner swine in human beings. If we recognize anything at all about National Socialism, it is the fact that it has succeeded for the first time in German politics in completely mobilizing human stupidity.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Germany had the world’s most prominent gay rights movement. It was home to an active feminist movement that, having just won the vote, was moving on to abortion rights. Campaigns against the death penalty had been so successful in Germany that, in practice, the ax was never used. At the beginning of the Republic, workers had won the eight-hour day with full pay. Jews from Poland and Russia were drawn to Germany’s tolerance and openness.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“No democracy can function for long, however, unless ultimately the divided groups are willing to compromise with one another.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“A persistent myth has it that the Treaty of Versailles was excessively harsh, and that its harshness explains the rage that gave rise to the Nazis. Actually, the treaty was the mildest of the post–First World War settlements. Experts on German and diplomatic history generally agree that it did not cause all the troubles of interwar Europe. Certainly, almost all Germans perceived the treaty to be unjust, which didn’t necessarily make it so.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“he was always trying to bring reasoned arguments to people who would never be reasonable, who in fact had no interest at all in facts or logic.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“among the Weimar Republic’s more fatal defects was that millions of its people deeply believed things that were verifiably untrue.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The canny party propagandist Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1932 that a nation that couldn’t manage to get control over the “necessary space, natural forces and natural resources for its material life” would inevitably “fall into dependence on foreign countries and lose its freedom.” The outcome of the First World War and the nature of the postwar world had proven this clearly, he claimed. “Thus a thick wall around Germany?” he asked. “Certainly we want to build a wall, a protective wall.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“On February 4, Hindenburg signed a decree giving the police wide powers to break up political meetings, ban associations, and shut down media outlets. Social Democratic and Communist newspapers began feeling the effects immediately. On February 14, a small army of Berlin police officers searched the Communists’ Reichstag offices, and ten days later, the police shut down the Communist Party’s Berlin headquarters. On February 17, Göring ordered all Prussian police officers to use their firearms against “enemies of the state.” On February 22, a further decree allowed members of the “Patriotic Associations”—this meant the SA, SS, and Steel Helmet—to be enrolled as auxiliary police officers.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“Then the judge, Kurt Ohnesorge, throws Hitler a lifeline. Ohnesorge is one of the many Weimar jurists who belong to the establishment conservative German National People’s Party. It’s not that he likes these rowdy Nazis. It’s that if he has to choose, he prefers them to the Socialists and Communists. “That has nothing to do with this trial,” he says, disallowing further questioning. Hitler is shaken and embarrassed. But he is saved.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“In any case, written laws on their own seldom mean very much, or, rather, they can mean many things, which amounts to the same thing. Laws cannot apply themselves. What matters is the whole cultural and political context in which fallible humans are going to execute them. The Weimar Constitution would have to operate in a political culture substantially shaped before the First World War.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“The question of how this could happen takes on a special, agonizing force against the background out of which Hitler and Nazism grew: the Germany of Weimar. Here, surely, was some kind of apex of human civilization. The 1919 constitution of the Weimar Republic created a state-of-the-art modern democracy, with a scrupulously just proportional electoral system and protection for individual rights and freedoms, expressly including the equality of men and women. Social and political activists fought, with considerable success, for even more. Germany had the world’s most prominent gay rights movement. It was home to an active feminist movement that, having just won the vote, was moving on to abortion rights. Campaigns against the death penalty had been so successful in Germany that, in practice, the ax was never used. At the beginning of the Republic, workers had won the eight-hour day with full pay. Jews from Poland and Russia were drawn to Germany’s tolerance and openness.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic

“ONE OF THE challenges of understanding what the Nazi movement was all about comes from a basic fact of politics. The Nazis were politicians: like all politicians, including fascists in other countries, they moved into the political space that was available to them, and their programs evolved to fit the supporters they attracted. This means that the Nazis’ ideology and goals were always deliberately vague and always changing. Hitler announced the “Twenty-Five Points” of the Nazi program with much fanfare in 1920, and sternly declared them unchangeable. He then ignored them, and they bore little relation to what he did once he reached power.”
― Benjamin Carter Hett, The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic