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Mostrando postagens com marcador nazismo. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador nazismo. Mostrar todas as postagens

sexta-feira, 29 de setembro de 2023

Babi Yar (Ucrânia): o começo do Holocausto - Paulo Roberto de Almeida e Hoje no Mundo Militar

Na pré-história prática do Holocausto:

Paulo Roberto de Almeida 

Babi Yar foi o primeiro experimento de execução de judeus em massa perpetrado por ordens expressas de Hitler, mas tinha um “defeito”: era “labour intensive”, ou seja, estava ainda baseado naquilo que os marxistas chamariam de “modo artesanal de produção” (neste caso, de eliminação em massa  de judeus).

Os nazistas, animados pelo princípio do produtivismo, aspiravam um método mais eficiente de elimina massa de judeus, mais “capital intensive”, e por isso passaram a um “modo industrial de produção” de cadáveres dentre as comunidades judaicas da Europa central e oriental. Adoraram as câmaras de gás e os fornos crematórios adjuntos aos campos de concentração, dentre os quais Auschwitz foi o mais, tristemente, famoso.

Jamais tinha ocorrido, na história da humanidade, um projeto burocraticamente organizado tão perverso e insano como foi concebido e organizado pelos líderes nazistas, Hitler en tête, o genocídio de TODO um povo conhecido como Holocausto. O stalinismo e o maoismo (e, proporcionalmente, o pol-potismo) mataram, deliberadamente ou involuntariamente, muito mais seres humanos, mas nada se igualou, na história de toda a humanidade, ao nazismo hitlerista, que também suscitou uma indústria secundária de negacionismo jamais vista nos anais do trabalho historiográfico, com efeitos politicos.

Por todas essas razões, Babi Yar deve ser sempre relembrado na história da Ucrânia e de toda a Europa oriental que esteve, alguma vez, sob ocupação nazista.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

============

De uma postagem de 29/09/2023 do site Hoje no Mundo Militar:

“Neste dia, no ano de 1941, teve início o massacre nazista de Babi Yar, na Ucrânia.

No dia 26 de setembro daquele ano, as forças nazistas de ocupação, que controlavam Kiev desde o dia 19, emitiram uma ordem obrigando todos os judeus ucranianos da cidade a se apresentarem na esquina da rua Mel'nikova e a rua Dokterivskaya. Os nazistas esperavam que fossem aparecer no máximo 6 mil judeus, mas às 8h da manhã do dia 29 de setembro, mais de 30 mil judeus ucranianos estavam no local designado.

Foram transportados em pequenos grupos para a ravina de Babi Yar, localizada a poucos quilômetros do centro de Kiev. No local, os nazistas, aproveitando-se do declive do terreno, executavam os grupos no fundo da ravina conforme iam chegando. À medida que os corpos se amontoavam, jogavam cal e uma fina camada de terra por cima para receber o grupo seguinte.

Entre os dias 29 e 30 de setembro de 1941, 33.771 judeus ucranianos foram brutalmente executados em Babi Yar. No total, considerando todo o período de ocupação, os nazistas mataram naquele local um número estimado em quase 150 mil judeus.”

domingo, 18 de setembro de 2022

As Forças Armadas na Política, não no Brasil, mas na Alemanha, para um enorme desastre nacional - leitura

 Estou lendo este livro, depressivamente instrutivo, sobre como as Forças Armadas da Prússia, e da Alemanha, foram especialmente ativas no ato de intervir na política do Estado, sempre provocando guerras de conquista e, em última instância, provocando a ruína do país e do seu povo.


Como relembra o autor na Introdução, Mirabeau, retornando a Paris no final do século XVIII (1788), escrevia isto: 

"La Prusse n'est pas um pays qui a une armée; c'est une armée qui a un pays", 

acrescentando em seguida: 

"La guerre est l'industrie nationale de la Prusse". 

Pois é, parece que outras Forças Armadas também tentaram dominar um país.

Eis o resumo do espírito com o qual este livro foi escrito, tal como o autor escreve em sua Introdução: 


Traduzo a última parte, que pode ser instrutiva, para outras épocas e outros países (como ênfase minha nas maiúsculas):

"Foi também meu objetivo mostrar a extensão da responsabilidade das Forças Armadas (da Alemanha) na ascensão dos nazistas ao poder, por tolerar as infâmias desse regime desde que alcançou o poder, E POR NÃO TOMAR AS MEDIDAS – numa fase em que só as FFAA o poderiam fazer – para remover aquele regime do poder." (p. x)

From the Epilogue (p. 694)

"As Forças Armadas dominaram a República de Weimar desde o momento exato de seu nascimento e o seu próprio eclipse aparente em Novembro de 1918, até as fantásticas circunstâncias de sua contribuição para os obséquios da República em janeiro de 1933. Elas procuraram dominar o Terceiro Reich da mesma maneira, e foram cegas e confiantes sob a impressão de que eles o estavam fazendo, até que a crise de 1938 diminuiu o seu orgulho e enfraqueceu o seu poder.
Até 1938, as FFAA foram o árbitro final dos destinos políticos do Reich. Elas tinham primeiro apoiado, e então condenaram a República à sua derrota, e tinham feito a principal contribuição para a chegada de Hitler ao poder. Elas entraram num pacto com o Partido [Nazista] de maneira a preservar o seu status privilegiado e influência, e, como resultado, foram culpadas de cumplicidade na Purga Sangrenta de 30 de junho de 1934 [aquela que eliminou Ernst Rohm e diversos membros das tropas de assalto, inclusive dois generais da Wehrmacht.]. Conhecendo muito bem o que tinham feito, elas aceitaram Hitler como chefe de Estado e ofereceram sua lealdade a ele pessoalmente como o Supremo Comandante, sempre com a reserva ao seu próprio arbítrio que elas poderiam desfazer o Cesar que elas criaram".  (p. 694) 

PRA: Muito parecido com certo país, bem conhecido...

O final foi a rendição incondicional de maio de 1945, na França e em Berlim, depois da completa derrota da Wehrmacht.

domingo, 31 de julho de 2022

Hitler e seus Comediantes, pelo jornalista José Jobim (1934): reedição pela Topboks (2022).

 Um livro praticamente desaparecido dos sebos, desde suas duas edições de 1934, e que constitui um primeiro testemunho, por um brasileiro, sobre o regime nazista em ascensão: 

Hitler e seus Comediantes (RJ: Cruzeiro do Sul, 1934).

Alguns anos depois, o político e jornalista Lindolfo Collor, faria também seus relatos, mas para o final da década, no limiar da nova guerra global. 

Hitler e seus comediantes

(Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2022)

Apresentação da Editora:

Jornalista e diplomata, o autor trabalhou como repórter para vários órgãos de imprensa e entre 1930 e 1936 foi enviado especial de O Jornal à Ásia, África e Europa.

Na Alemanha, impressionou-se com a ascensão meteórica de Hitler e fez anotações importantes para uma grande reportagem, que pretendia publicar na imprensa carioca. Mas, ao voltar ao Rio com essa intenção, nenhum jornal quis se ariscar. Então transformou o excelente material num livro, que teve duas edições em 1934, virou raridade e só agora, quase nove décadas depois, retorna às livrarias. 

Nele, José Jobim fala de tudo que viu, dos discursos inflamados de Hitler e das muitas pessoas que lhe contaram histórias dramáticas. Sua carreira diplomática teve início em 1938, e no Itamaraty, entre outros postos, serviu no Paraguai, durante o início das negociações para a criação da Hidrelétrica de Itaipu, e como embaixador na Argélia, Vaticano e Marrocos, aposentando-se em 1975. 

Em 22 de março de 1979, aos 69 anos, saiu de casa para visitar um amigo e não mais retornou. Encontrado morto dois dias depois, a polícia tratou o caso como suicídio, mas na verdade ele fora sequestrado e assassinado pela ditadura empresarial-militar por estar escrevendo um livro onde denunciaria um esquema de corrupção no financiamento e construção da Itaipu Binacional. 

Depois de anos de luta de sua família, em 2018 se deu o reconhecimento de que José Jobim havia sido vítima da violência do Estado brasileiro. Sua certidão de óbito foi corrigida.

========

Ele tinha publicado, no mesmo ano, seu livro imediatamente anterior, que tratou do caso de Portugal sob o Estado Novo: 

A Verdade sobre Salazar: entrevistas concedidas em Paris pelo Sr. Affonso Costa (RJ: Calvino Filho, 1934).

Também registrei as investigações sobre a sua morte, bem como a homenagem que lhe foi prestada pela turma que se formou no Instituto Rio Branco em 2021 em pelo menos quatro postagens de meu blog: 

José Jobim: o embaixador que sabia demais - André Bernardo 

A ferida aberta do Itamaraty : José Jobim, patrono da turma de 2021 - Ricardo Lessa (Piauí)

Cold Case no Itamaraty: a estranha morte do embaixador Jobim em 1979 - Hellen Guimarães (revista Epoca)

Nova turma do Instituto Rio Branco homenageia embaixador morto pela ditadura - Eliane Oliveira (Globo)


quarta-feira, 11 de maio de 2022

Quem é fascista na guerra da Ucrânia? - Jaime Pinsky (CB, Chumbo Gordo)

Quem é fascista na guerra da Ucrânia? 

Jaime Pinsky

10/05/2022

Verdade. Muitos ucranianos ficaram do lado nazista durante a II Guerra Mundial. Isso dá aos russos o direito de invadir o país vizinho?

OTAN- UCRÂNIA

PUBLICADO ORIGINALMENTE NO CORREIO BRAZILIENSE
E NO SITE DO AUTOR, www.jaimepinsky.com.br

A bandeira da Ucrânia tem as cores azul e amarela. Já o grupo nacionalista direitista Pravy Sector usa a mesma bandeira, mas com as cores preta e vermelha. Este grupo se organizou a partir de 2013/14 quando promoveu manifestações contra seu governo, aliado da Rússia, conseguiu depô-lo e acabou por mergulhar o país em um caos político, econômico e étnico. A situação só se equilibrou a partir da surpreendente eleição do atual presidente, Vladimir Zielensky. Ele competiu como um “azarão”, entre os partidários da Rússia e os ultra-direitista. Para surpresa de todo mundo e do mundo todo ele venceu as eleições, tornou-se popular e acabou tendo que sustentar uma guerra contra Putin que não se conformou com sua vitória, uma vez que desejava um governante submisso aos seus desejos.

Todos devem se lembrar que no início do atual governo brasileiro grupos bolsonaristas referiam-se a “ucranizar” o Brasil. Seu objetivo declarado era promover uma guinada para a direita. Mas não seria errado supor que tinham a intenção de destituir poderes da República, algo promovido pelo grupo ucraniano que lhes servia de modelo (em 2014). A ultra direita ucraniana era chauvinista, francamente antirrussa, antissemita e antiglobalização. Além do que, é bom lembrar que agrupamentos políticos como o Pravy Sector promoviam treinamento militar, que ofereciam a correligionários de outros países. A militante bolsonarista, muito evidente no início do mandato presidencial atual, Sara Winter, proclamava a quem queria ouvir e a quem não queria também, que ela própria teria recebido treinamento na Ucrânia, com esse pessoal.

Putin e seu circulo de apoiadores alega que ao derrubar, em 2014, um presidente legalmente eleito, os ucranianos tiveram uma atitude fascista, de nacionalismo extremo, com caráter de antiglobalização, além de chauvinista. De fato, esse perfil político tem se manifestado em muitos países, podendo ser uma ameaça séria às instituições democráticas. Contudo, a invasão russa não se deu por aqueles que poderíamos chamar de “bons motivos”. Em nenhum momento o governo russo preocupou-se com a democracia, mesmo porque o próprio presidente russo não é um exemplo acabado de democrata radical… Ele manipulou e manipula as leis e os tribunais russos, colocando-os a serviço de seus interesses, não do interesse do aperfeiçoamento da democracia russa, muito menos do sistema democrático como concepção e prática política. Aristóteles já dizia, há mais de dois mil anos, que o sistema democrático baseia-se, antes de tudo, em “governar por turnos”, isto é, em haver revezamento de indivíduos e correntes políticas no poder. Oferecer veneno e cadeia aos adversários – o que tem acontecido na Rússia – não é, exatamente, a melhor maneira de estimular o desenvolvimento da democracia, convenhamos.

Não deixa de ser irônico que Putin não esperava por Zelinsky no poder. Um não político (era ator, antes de ser presidente, imitava e caricaturava presidentes na tevê, entre outras atividades artísticas) no poder, um cidadão com antecedentes familiares judaicos, não podia e não pode ser chamado de fascista ou de antissemita. Mas, como a lógica formal não é problema para governos autoritários, Putin e seu círculo de poder fingem que o presidente ucraniano é de extrema direita. Não é. E agora, para coroar a falta de sentido de algumas acusações, além de garantirem que os governantes ucranianos podem  ser antissemitas e judeus (!) um ministro russo acaba de afirmar que Zelinsky pode ser fascista, embora judeu, pois até Hitler tinha sangue judaico. O absurdo é evidente. Mas, não se trata apenas de atentado à lógica. É também um atentado às milhões de vítimas do nazismo. Além de infeliz, imbecil, grosseira, agressiva, a frase de uma autoridade russa fere todas as pessoas de bom senso no mundo, as de bom caráter, as sensíveis, todas as que têm compromisso com verdade. E, devo deixar muito claro, sou um apreciador da cultura russa, amo seus escritores – vários assassinados por Stalin – seus músicos, suas orquestras, seus cineastas, seus dançarinos.

Contudo, como neto de imigrantes, que só escaparam das câmaras de gás nazistas, perpetradas pelo mesmo Hitler a quem o ministro russo se refere como tendo sague judeu, eu me sinto no direito e no dever moral de solicitar pedido formal de desculpas por parte dessa autoridade. Minha avó Sara só escapou do Holocausto, com seus nove filhos, porque o Brasil permitiu que para cá ela viesse. Foi um bom investimento do país: hoje somos, entre netos, bisnetos e tataranetos dela mais de duzentos bons brasileiros que trabalham aqui como médicos, professores, empresários, técnicos, dentistas, editores, artistas, ente outras profissões.

Sim, a Ucrânia talvez não possa se vangloriar de seu passado democrático, de ser um país aberto para minorias culturais e étnicas. Sim, durante a II Guerra Mundial nem sempre colaborou com as democracias; na verdade, esteve mais perto da Alemanha nazista e há casos terríveis de massacres perpetrados por ucranianos contra minorias nessa época e até antes da guerra.  Contudo, ter ficado do “lado certo” contra o nazismo não dá à Rússia carta branca para invadir seus vizinhos, estados independentes, mesmo que não goste de seus governantes. E inventar mentiras contra ucranianos e outros povos não é digno de um país e um povo tão relevantes quanto o russo.

_________________________

JAIME PINSKY: Historiador, professor titular da Unicamp, autor ou coautor de 30 livros, diretor editorial da Editora Contexto. Autor de vários livros sobre preconceito, cidadania e escravidão. Organizador e coautor do livro “Novos Combates da História“.

jaimepinsky@gmail.com

www.jaimepinsky.com.br

quarta-feira, 27 de abril de 2022

Os bilionários nazistas, Adam Tooze - Chartbook #117

 

Chartbook #117: Nazi billionaires 

Source: Harper Collins

Journalist and historian David de Jong started work at Bloomberg just shortly after Zucotti park was violently cleared of protestors, on the orders of Mike Bloomberg, his new boss. As he describes it: 

In the wake of the previous years’ financial crisis, the tension between the 1 percent and the 99 percent was palpable around the globe. Though I was hired to cover American business dynasties such as the Kochs and the Waltons (who control Walmart), I was soon asked to add the German-speaking nations to my beat …

This provides the rather striking opening to his highly readable study of ultra wealthy German families - the Quandts, the Flicks, the von Fincks, the Porsche-Piëchs and the Oetkers - and their entanglement with Hitler’s National Socialist regime. 

The Nazi regime and business has been studied again and again. There were the muckraking (in the historical sense of the term) investigations that accompanied the Nuremberg trials. 

Then there were the hard fought battles of the Cold War. The work of Marxisant business historians in West Germany regularly appeared with passages inked out by the order of the courts. In the US in the 1980s David Abraham, Henry Ashby Turner, Gerald Feldman et al did bloody battle over the responsibility of German business for Hitler’s rise to power. Out of that conflict emerged the first generation of new business histories led by Peter Hayes’s highly influential study of IG Farben. In the 1990s the new focus on the Holocaust and forced labour litigation triggered a further wave of studies. In some cases there were commissioned by the firms themselves. In other cases they were the work of independent academics. 

There is not enough space to do justice to this huge literature in a single newsletter. I will return to it. 

Though he draws on all these earlier studies, de Jong’s book is as a history of German business in the Nazi era that reflects the preoccupations of the years since 2008, the Occupy movement, and the discourse of the 1 v. 99 percent. It is, if you like, a post-Piketty history of Nazi Germany. 

The families at the heart of de Jong’s book were not necessarily the most influential business people in the Nazi regime. He isn’t talking about the CEOs of IG Farben, or Rheinmetall or Krupp. His selection is dictated by two criteria - closeness to the Nazi regime in political and personal terms - and prominence and wealth in the postwar period. 

The Quandt’s tick both boxes most emphatically. As owners of BMW - though that is not how their money was made - they are amongst the wealthiest people in the world. The current generation are descendants of Magda Goebbels who killed herself and all but one of her children in the Führer bunker in 1945. Magda’s first husband, Günther Quandt (1881-1954) to whom they owe their name, was a major supplier of arms, ammunition and batteries to the Nazi war effort and a gigantic employer of forced labour. 

Friedrich Flick was an early sponsor of the Nazi movement and Germany’s wealthiest man twice over. His son Friedrich Karl Flick recalcitrantly denied any wrong-doing on his family’s behalf and frittered away their fortune. So that the youngest members of the family are perhaps worth a mere 1.8 billion euros each. 

The von Finck family, which straddle Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland, were founders of the twin titans of Allianz Insurance and Munich Re. They supplied Hitler’s regime with an Economics Minister, helped build Hitler’s art collections and profited handsomely from the Aryanization of Rothschild assets in Vienna. Their parsimony has ensured that they have stayed in the top ranks of German billionaires down to the present day. 

Rudolf-August Oetker the founder of Oetker’s dramatic postwar growth was a volunteer in the Waffen-SS officer who eagerly enrolled in training courses at Dachau concentration camp. When he died in 2014 he left his 8 children from three marriages with a brand name known throughout Germany - for baking goods - and equal shares of a fortune worth $12 billion at the time. 

The Porsche-Piëchs built Hitler’s Volkswagen - a factory to rival that of Ford. As de Jong shows they not only took advantages of the Nazi seizure of power to boot out their Jewish business partner Adolf Rosenberger, but have systematically written him out of history ever since. 

Though many of these stories are well known, de Jong assembles a compelling and horrifying group portrait. And his points of emphasis are thought-provoking. 

Of late the literature has tended to focus on forced labour, slave labour, contacts between business and the SS. De Jong’s families were involved in that.But, tellingly, de Jong starts not in the 1940s but in 1933. 

On Monday, February 20, 1933, at 6 p.m., about two dozen of Nazi Germany’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen arrived, on foot or by chauffeured car, to attend a meeting at the official residence of the Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, in the heart of Berlin’s government and business district. The attendees included Günther Quandt, a textile producer turned arms-and-battery tycoon; Friedrich Flick, a steel magnate; Baron August von Finck, a Bavarian finance mogul; Kurt Schmitt, CEO of the insurance behemoth Allianz; executives from the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben and the potash giant Wintershall; and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, chairman-through-marriage of the Krupp steel empire. 

The purpose of that meeting was not to sell big business on anti-semitism, Hitler’s plans for world conquest, or the Holocaust. Hitler’s regime as we now know it was not up for for debate. The purpose of the meeting was to raise money with which to end German democracy. 

“Private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy,” the forty-three-year-old chancellor said. “It is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality. Everything positive, good and valuable, which has been achieved in the world in the field of economics and culture, is solely attributable to the importance of personality.”

What Hitler and his movement needed was money with which to win the election of March 5 1933. It was to be a decisive vote. 

“the last election,” according to Hitler. One way or another, democracy would fall. Germany’s new chancellor intended to dissolve it entirely and replace it with a dictatorship. “Regardless of the outcome,” he warned, “there would be no retreat . . . There are only two possibilities, either to crowd back the opponent on constitutional grounds . . . or a struggle will be conducted with other weapons, which may demand greater sacrifices.” If the election didn’t bring Hitler’s party into control, a civil war between the right and the left would certainly erupt, he intimated. Hitler waxed poetic: “I hope the German people recognize the greatness of the hour. It shall decide the next ten or probably even hundred years.”

What Hitler, Goering and Schacht had in mind was a fund equivalent to $20 million in today’s money with which to win the election and end Germany democracy. They had no problem raising the funds. 

The day after the meeting, February 21, 1933, thirty-five-year-old Joseph Goebbels, who led the Nazi propaganda machine from Berlin as the capital’s Gauleiter (regional leader), wrote in his diary: “Göring brings the joyful news that 3 million is available for the election. Great thing! I immediately alert the whole propaganda department. And one hour later, the machines rattle. Now we will turn on an election campaign . . . Today the work is fun. The money is there.” Goebbels had started this very diary entry the day before, describing the depressed mood at his Berlin headquarters because of the lack of funds. What a difference twenty-four hours could make. 

If the choice was between consolidating Hitler’s or continuing the Weimar Republic, by 1933 the German business community knew which way it would swing. 

This had not always been their choice. In the 1920s they had learned to live with the Weimar Republic and its Western-facing foreign policy. But after ten years of what they regarded as intolerable instability, with the Communist Party surging, the economy in deep crisis and little prospect of a return to the international economic order of the 1920s, they made their choice.

They were not the only ones. As I argued in Deluge, faced with the collapse of Anglo-American hegemony in the Great Depression, Italian and Japanese elites also swung to a nationalist course. 

They got more than they had bargained for. German business was not without influence at the technical level in the Third Reich. In technical and industrial terms they shaped what was possible. Some who were considered untrustworthy or insufficiently enthusiastic were bullied or even lost control of their businesses. But that was far from being the majority experience. For the most part the trade offs offered by the Nazi regime were extremely attractive. There is much more to say about this but businesses profited handsomely. But any illusion they might have had that they were backing a conservative nationalist government in which figures like the publisher Alfred Hugenberg or the military high command would call the shots were soon dispelled. They had embarked on a dramatic va banque adventure dominated by Hitler’s vision of racial war. 

De Jong does a skillful job of interweaving family history with the drama and violence that began in 1938 with the Anschluss of Austria and continued down to the stabilization of the 1950s. 

Defeat was a shock but it did not end the prosperity of this cluster of families. All of them survived the war. Their fortunes were if not intact, then at least the basis for regrowth. And this is the bigger point to highlight about de Jong’s account. It is a story of continuity, a story of relentless accumulation across some of the most massive caesura in modern history. 

To that extent it runs counter to one of the findings commonly taken away from the inequality studies of recent years, that war was one of the very few forces that disrupts entrenched wealth inequality. This is the headline, for instance, of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century

Does the emphasis on continuity in a study like de Jong’s contradict that basic idea? 

Of course, one might take refuge in the fact that de Jong’s study is not an exercise in quantitative history. It is to be regretted that it does not include a quantitative tracking of the fortunes of his subjects. 

By starting with the families whose wealth continued to accumulate he has built in survivorship bias. We don’t learn about the wealthy Germans - if there were any such persons - whose fortunes were destroyed by the war and the subsequent division of Germany. It was clearly bad for the landowners of East Prussia. 

Focusing on the billionaires with Nazi connections gives us a distorted impression of wealth in Germany today. In the list of the top 30 German fortunes today, the Quandts and the von Fincks are flanked by families like the Herz’s who made their fortune in coffee after the war, or the Albrechts who are heirs to the Aldi retail fortune. The 2021 top 30 billionaire list for Germany is here and as far as I can see Nazi-related fortunes make up a small minority of the group. 

But, survive the Quandts and the von Fincks did. And before dismissing them as flukes it is interesting to consider some other possible implications of de Jong’s history. 

To start with, what do the German data tell us about the impact of World War II on wealth and income inequality in that country? What kind of shock did the Nazi regime, the war and postwar division deliver to wealth in general? 

We owe the best estimates on this score to the recent work by N. H. Albers, Charlotte Bartels and Moritz Schularick in their 2020 paper The Distribution of Wealth in Germany, 1895-2018

As a baseline they use Prussian data, which yield this fascinating breakdown of wealth in Prussia before World War I. 

Tracking the wealth share of the top one percent shows it falling monotonously from just before World War I through to the 1970s. 

The data are patchy but what is striking is not so much the impact of the wars as such, but the Great Depression of the 1930s and postwar fiscal measures, notably the Lastenausgleich (Burden Equalization) legislation passed in West Germany in 1952, building on Weimar and Nazi-era precedents. 

According to the careful estimates by Albers et al, postwar wealth taxes in West Germany had twice the impact on the top 1 % share as did the destruction of property predominantly owned by the wealthy during the war.

These are fascinating data and the postwar wealth tax legislation of West Germany are a topic to return to. 

But relating these data to de Jong’s narrative still poses problems. In relying on large statistical aggregates to measure the wealth distribution are we actually able to capture the history of the largest fortunes? When we say that wars tend to redistribute wealth, whose wealth is it that gets redistributed? Is it the wealth of the ultra-ultra-rich or merely that of the very rich? The 0.0001% or the 1%? It would be fascinating to know whether the records of the Lastenausgleich tax allow one to throw light on these questions. 

In the mean time there is at least one study that does dig into the top 1 percent income share. 

Fabien Dell of INSEE and Paris-Jourdan calculates top 1 percent and top 0.01 percent shares for German and Swiss incomes.

The income data broadly follow the story of declining inequality shown by the wealth data. But in the income data we see a major recovery of the share of the top 1 percent during the period of the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1940. 

And this is even more pronounced in the data for the top 0.01 percent. Their share doubles between the Weimar Republic and the outbreak of World War II. And what is also striking is how robust the top 0.01 share of national income remains after 1945. In 2000, on Dell’s data, it is still comfortably above the levels measured for the Weimar Republic. 

Income and wealth inequality are two different things. But as Dell points out, the incomes of those in the top 1 percent are heavily driven by capital income. So his data strongly confirm the supposition that the Nazi regime was very good for Germany’s wealthy class.

On closer inspection, in short, the appearance of contradiction between the aggregative view of inequality trends and the importance of war shocks and de Jong’s case study approach dissolves. Indeed, the two views seem to complement each other. 

World War I, the revolution, hyperinflation, Weimar democracy and the great depression delivered a nasty shock to German wealth, which shows up clearly in a break in the income and wealth inequality data. To guard against any further erosion at the hands of democracy, the wealthy placed a bet on Hitler and between 1933 and 1940 Hitler’s regime delivered handsomely on the bargain. War damage was severe, but not devastating. There was plenty of opportunity for plunder in the occupied territories and, in the event that Germany had won, the most prominent collaborators of the regime would not doubt have been rewarded even more amply. It was a high risk gamble but not an unfathomable one. I explore the politics of the moment of maximum risk in 1939-1940 at length in Wages of Destruction. Defeat was a shock, but not, in the end, a disaster. West Germany delivered capitalist democratic stability anchored safely within the US orbit. That was a deal that German elites had been willing to accept in the 1920s under far more precarious circumstances. The price of postwar stability was some redistribution to stabilize a society crowded with refugees, homeless and displaced persons. That shifted wealth shares. But what might have been a dramatic moment for wholesale redistribution by way of a 50 percent flat rate levy on all wealth assessed in 1948, was instead commuted into a manageable tax. As Albers et al put it succinctly:

Instead of paying the full amount in 1952 (due in Lastenausgleich tax), households and companies (that had done well out of the war) made quarterly amortization payments including interest until 1979. The combined annual payment amounted to 4-6% of the total initial amount of 1948, depending on the asset type (Albers, 1989, p. 288). Put differently, the main levy thus corresponded to an annual wealth tax of 2-3% on the initially assessed net wealth in 1948. This implied that it could be paid from the returns of private wealth rather than its substance

This confirms the most fundamental point conveyed by in-depth narratives like de Jong’s. Continuity achieved by all means necessary. 

De Jong alerts us to the structures of ownership and influence which perdure even if the book value of assets is written down, a family member or two falls out of favor for a while, or business is bad for a few years. Wealth and privilege persist - or perhaps we should better say they are produced and reproduced - through their anchoring in law and through networks of social contacts and relationships of trust and kinship. 

They also persist through crafting self-protective narratives that legitimize and defend wealth. This is where history and, in particular, business histories come in. It can serve as legitimizing device for wealth, or as a powerful check and source of accountability. 

De Jong’s book, as much as anything, is an intervention in the discourses that surround modern German wealth and its history. As he himself acknowledges it is not the most scholarly or archival study of German business and the Nazi regime. There are plenty of those, nowadays even commissioned by the businesses themselves, for the sake of transparency, of course. But, they remain untranslated and veiled in scholarly apparatus. They tend non-accidentally to disappear from view. The result is a culture of apparent transparency but de facto ignorance or even denial. 

The challenge as de Jong reminds us is to reactualize this history. To continually find new ways to bring it into the present. The result is a fresh and highly readable account. But for me it is less the novel framing of de Jong’s story that I admire than the fact that he has taken up this Sisyphean labour of rolling the heavy boulder of history up the hill again.

quinta-feira, 19 de novembro de 2020

How American Racism Influenced Hitler, book by James Q. Whitman - reviewed by Alex Ross (New Yorker)

Eu já tinha  me referido a este livro meses atrás, com base numa resenha na New York Review of Books. Agora este artigo na New Yorker, bem mais alentado.

James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton).

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 

A Critic at Large

April 30, 2018 Issue (reprinted again)

How American Racism Influenced Hitler

Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.

By Alex Ross

Reprint: The New Yorker, November 18, 2020


Hitler circa 1923.

Hitler, circa 1923. Five years later, he noted, approvingly, that white Americans had “gunned down . . . millions of redskins.”Photograph from Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty


“History teaches, but has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it’s said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue includes “I Was Hitler’s Pilot,” “I Was Hitler’s Chauffeur,” “I Was Hitler’s Doctor,” “Hitler, My Neighbor,” “Hitler Was My Friend,” “He Was My Chief,” and “Hitler Is No Fool.” Books have been written about Hitler’s youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in interior design (“Hitler at Home”).

Why do these books pile up in such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany’s plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler’s undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his creation—finalized after “innumerable attempts,” according to “Mein Kampf.”) Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not only in S & M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag wrote, a “response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality.” Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler’s negative mystique.

Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf,” Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.

The vast literature on Hitler and Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War? The second is sociopolitical: How did a civilized society come to embrace Hitler’s extreme ideas? The third has to do with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler’s rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar.

Since 1945, the historiography of Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an “opportunist entirely without principle.” German thinkers often skirted the issue of Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the loneliness of the modern subject.

In the sixties and seventies, as Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis—the idea that Germany had followed a “special path” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop along healthy liberal-democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying that Nazism was something that he did to us. Mommsen outlined a “cumulative radicalization” of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned as a “weak dictator,” ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester’s 1968 book, “The Arms of Krupp,” ends with a lurid image of “the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting.”

The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became known as the Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Dispute”), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim Fest, who had published the first big German-language biography of Hitler, also stood apart from the Sonderweg school. By portraying the Führer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to accept responsibility for the Nazi terror.

Outside Germany, many critiques of the Sonderweg thesis came from the left. The British scholars Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book “The Peculiarities of German History,” questioned the “tyranny of hindsight”—the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform, public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair or the Tiszaeszlár blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also questioned whether élitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the Germans.

Ian Kershaw’s monumental two-volume biography (1998-2000) found a plausible middle ground between “strong” and “weak” images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of “working towards the Führer”: when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler’s leadership go back and forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated—and, for the moment, rejected—the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

People have been trying to fathom Hitler’s psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book “Explaining Hitler,” gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or—a personal favorite—that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the “lost safe-deposit box” mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a “man without qualities.” Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler’s private life. The first volume, “Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939,” was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich’s Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. “The putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader,” Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler’s love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer’s psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann’s startling essay “Bruder Hitler,” the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title “That Man Is My Brother.” Aligning Hitler’s experience with his own, Mann wrote of a “basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity—based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing.”

The claims of “Mein Kampf” notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment’s commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany’s “inner internationalism.”

The historian Thomas Weber, who recounted Hitler’s soldier years in the 2010 book “Hitler’s First War,” has now written “Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi” (Basic), a study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful, though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the Army because, as Weber writes, it “provided a raison d’être for his existence.” As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was no sign of the Führer-to-be.

The unprecedented anarchy of postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine; politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in “The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), emphasizes the whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had “broken with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for a ‘just peace.’ ” The harshness of the terms of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric.

The day after Germany ratified the treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a “tired stray dog looking for a master.” Having noticed Hitler’s gift for public speaking, Mayr installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers’ Party, a tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks. Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career. At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first part of “Mein Kampf,” in which he completed the construction of his world view.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt). Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself. At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.” The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title. On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.” Yes, it does.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means. This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels’s propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it. “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple,” he wrote.

The true artist does not compromise. Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler’s “prophecy” was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion. This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. “Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.” (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.”

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color!”—the British production “Hitler in Color.” A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting. ♦


Published in the print edition of the April 30, 2018, issue, with the headline “The Hitler Vortex.”


Alex Ross has been the magazine’s music critic since 1996. His latest book is “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.”