The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
In the German election of 1928, Hitler’s National Socialist Party won 810,000 votes, making it the smallest party to warrant representation in the Reichstag. In 1930 they had six and a half million votes, and were the second largest party in the German Parliament. In the 1933 election, Hitler and the Nazis won 13,745,000 votes, and were by far the largest party in the Reichstag, but they still did not have a majority.
After that, elections did not matter, because they did not occur. Hitler demanded that Hindenburg, the president and head of state, make him the chancellor, the leader of the Reichstag. Hindenburg died shortly after the 1933 election, and Hitler named himself both chancellor and president of Germany.
Up through the 1933 election, Germany was still a democracy. With alarming speed, it became a totalitarian dictatorship.
To accomplish this, Hitler installed a coterie of carefully chosen yes-men whom he convinced should do only what he instructed them to do. If they did not do his bidding, they were gone. Early on they were merely fired. Later some of them were dispatched with the ultimate pink slip.
Once Hitler assumed the dual roles of head of state and leader of the Reichstag, he totally consolidated his power within his own autocratic office. Hitler became Germany, and Germany became Hitler.
King Louis XIV of France was reputed to have said, “L’etat c’est moi”: The state --- it is I.” By the late Thirties, Hitler was inextricably identified with the German state. Hitler held the same lofty conviction about himself as did the Sun King. He was the state.
Hitler did not assume absolute power instantaneously. It took him a few years and many carefully-planned stratagems. By the time the war began, Hitler and the Gestapo had established a reign of terror over almost every facet of German life.
There is one particular element of the Nazi takeover of Germany I want to highlight in this essay. It involved the conflict between what became known as the “German Christians” and the “Confessing Church.”
A century ago Germany was nominally two-thirds Protestant (mainly Lutheran), and one-third Roman Catholic. As Nazism evolved, a large majority who called themselves the German Christians eventually strongly supported Hitler. A small minority called themselves the Confessing Church. They mildly and then more openly spoke out against Hitler and the governing National Socialist Party.
After the 1933 election which enabled Hitler to seize complete power, The German Catholic Church initially opposed Nazism. As Hitler’s influence increased, however, Roman Catholic bishops and priests became almost as quiescent as the Protestant German Christians, leaving only the Confessing Church to express their resistance. In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical condemning Nazism, but his successor, Pius XII, gave tacit if not actual support to the Nazis, hoping thereby to protect the Roman Catholic Church.
Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoeller of the Berlin suburb of Dahlem was the best known spokesman for the Confessing Church. He had been a highly decorated submarine commander in World War I. Niemoeller thought the German Republic which was established after the First World War was woefully ineffective, and he believed Hitler might represent a way out of the economic and political morass into which Germany plunged after the Great War.
By 1934, however, Pastor Niemoeller knew that the Nazis were anathema to both Germany and the world. Courageously he began to preach against the regime, knowing that it would likely result in his arrest and imprisonment, which it did. In 1937 he was sent to the infamous prison camp in Dachau, near Munich, where he remained incarcerated until the camp was liberated by the American Army in 1945.
There were over fifty attempts by various conspiracies to overthrow Hitler and the Nazis from the early 1930s through the end of World War II. None of them succeeded. Many of those conspirators were Confessing Christians, including the most famous among them, Count von Stauffenberg, who was shot for his leadership of a nearly successful plot.
For Americans, the most famous of the conspirators was the young German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who studied and taught at New York’s Union Theological Seminary before the war. He felt a patriotic duty to return to his homeland and join the resistance against Hitler. He was arrested and imprisoned. Just two weeks before the war ended, Bonhoeffer was cruelly executed by the Nazi regime.
Throughout the Thirties and during the war itself, the animosity between the German Christians and the Confessing Church became very bitter. The conservative German Christians believed Hitler had restored Germany to its rightful place as a great power, but the more liberal Confessing Christians were certain he was leading Germany and Europe into an inevitable ethical, political, and military maelstrom.
The Nazi Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically slaughtered, is widely known. What is much less recognized is that an additional six million other people were also executed. Most of them were Slavs, Roma (Gypsies), and other nationalities deemed inferior by Hitler. In addition there were mentally and physically disabled people, those with genetic abnormalities, communists, anarchists, and other such political undesirables. Included among the six million “others” were tens or hundreds of thousands of Confessing Church clergy and members, Catholic priests and Catholic laity, and other religious individuals whom Hitler branded as “enemies of the people.”
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It is conceivable that religiously motivated and other types of Americans may be faced with a similar situation to that of Germany ninety years ago. In1930 no one in Germany could have imagined that someone as unlikely as Adolf Hitler could seize total power in one of the world’s leading liberal nations, but it happened. No one could have imagined Donald Trump becoming President of the United States prior to 2016, but it happened. It is important to remember that both men initially achieved the pinnacle of governmental power by means of free and fair elections. There was no coup d’etat; the people duly elected both Herr Hitler and Mr. Trump, even if it was the Electoral College which put Trump into the presidency..
Without question there are many differences as well as some similarities between Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. That, however, is not the primary theme of this essay. What is at issue here are the similarities in how a sizeable segment of the religious populace of Germany and the USA came to perceive these two autocratically-inclined leaders.
According to pollsters in 2016, 85% of those who identify themselves as “evangelical” Christians voted for Mr. Trump. Now, after three years of growing polarization between evangelicals and other religious or non-religious people, 80% of evangelicals still say they support Mr. Trump. This continues despite numerous revelations about dubious actions of the President, and the abundance of his own vitriolic personal attacks on his perceived enemies as well as his interminable false and profane tweets.
Exactly the same pattern held true in Germany in the Thirties. Most German Christians backed Hitler all the way to the devastating Gotterdammerung, while virtually everyone in the Confessing Church strongly opposed him. They were convinced Hitler would lead Germany to defeat when the inevitably approaching war would finally end.
Non-evangelical American Christians, other religious Americans, and non-religious Americans are mystified by how conservative American Christians can continue to back a man whose morality was reputed to be very shady prior to becoming President but especially since he became President. No doubt doctoral theses are currently being written about that seemingly inexplicable topic. Many other historical critiques will continue to be written about it for decades to come.
Christianity Today is an evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham many years ago. In mid-December, its editor, Mark Galli, wrote an editorial in Christianity Today in which he called for the President to be removed from office, either by impeachment or by the electorate in the 2020 election should he fail to be convicted of impeachment.
Editorials about anything in any religious magazines rarely make the headlines. Before CT subscribers had even received their copies of that week’s issue, the liberal press had picked up the story. Within hours the conservative press, including the conservative religious press, also began to follow the story, denouncing Mr. Galli for denouncing the President.
After the brouhaha erupted, Mark Galli predicted that his words would have little effect on evangelicals. Subsequent reporting and polling suggested he is correct in that assumption. The Trump base is still holding very firm in their support of the President.
These two facts are undeniable: In the 1930s the strongest support for Hitler came from a particular type of conservative German Christians. In the 2010s Trump’s strongest support comes from a particular type of American Christian evangelicals.
There seems to be a chord in religiously conservative people that is struck by strong leaders who boastfully or surreptitiously declare their own strength. The connection is usually not intellectual; it is fundamentally emotional.
Adolf Hitler was a genius at cultivating his political base, as is Donald Trump in playing to his base. The political rallies of both men are a study in the mastery of crowd psychology. Intuitively, Hitler knew and Trump knows pre3cisely what to say and how to say it in order to rouse their followers to a very high level of supra-rational zeal.
According to Mr. Trump’s first wife Ivana, for years he had a copy of Mein Kampf on his nightstand, plus other books about Hitler. Could it be that he has been cleverly and furtively planning something for thirty years? In these turbulent times, that is a conspiracy theory upon which one might exercise one’s overly-battered brain cells.
The year 2020 will determine whether or not Donald Trump might possibly become another full-blown Adolf Hitler. Should the Senate convict the President of the House charges regarding impeachment, the President will be removed from office, and the matter will be constitutionally settled. The President’s burgeoning bubble will have burst.
However, without a Senate impeachment trial in which more witnesses are subpoenaed to testify, and with the evangelical Mitch McConnell promising a zero chance of the President being convicted, the impeachment appears doomed. Thus it will be the voters who will decide whether Mr. Trump shall receive a second term in office.
And that is precisely the problem. Virtually all of Trump’s evangelical backers will vote for him. In addition, several million other hard-core Republicans, who oppose his immorality and the damage he has inflicted on American foreign and domestic policy, will nonetheless reluctantly cast their ballots in Trump’s favor. They will steadfastly refuse to cast a ballot for whoever will be the Democratic candidate for the presidency.
The campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination feels as though it has been plodding on for five or ten years. This scenario thus renders the probability that many Democrats and independents will be also be unwilling to vote for the Democratic candidate, whoever it is. Their displeasure with the pain of the process may turn them against whoever the candidate turns out to be.
Taking a year and a half to pare down twenty-four candidates to just one has been an inevitably dismaying and discouraging torture. Having been badly splintered by the campaign, many anti-Trump voters may choose not to vote at all or to thrown their vote away to a third-party candidate. Thus Donald Trump may be granted the opportunity to continue trying to do what Hitler succeeded in doing eighty years ago. Once again a minority of American voters may give Mr. Trump a free pass to do whatever he pleases.
Are these conjectures nothing more than the fearful fretting of a lifelong amateur observer of political trends? I sincerely hope they are. Truly I do. Donald Trump may be far less of a threat than I suppose him to be.
If, on the other hand, there is validity in these fears, I believe it behooves preachers and many others with growing urgency to point out the dangers inherent in the behavior and capricious political decisions of our President. Conservative Christians will denounce such political preaching, because traditionally most conservatives claim that the pulpit must never be used for political purposes.
Conveniently overlooked in that stance is the fact that for the past generation evangelical pulpits have steadily been used to oppose the right of women to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy, and for speaking out against homosexuality and same-sex-marriage, and for engendering anti-Muslim fervor. These are decidedly political, as well as moral and religious, issues.
In Germany in the 1930s, the great majority of pulpits were silent about the clearest and most present danger then facing the Reich. Nazism and World War II was the result of that silence.
If Donald Trump is truly a Hitler-In-Waiting, and the Senate does not convict him of impeachment, and a sufficient number of voters do not prevent him from winning a second term, a democratic people will deserve exactly what they brought upon themselves by their unwillingness or inability to observe the signs on the times, if indeed these are the signs of the times. And then, will God help us, after we will have timidly refused to help ourselves? - January 1, 2020
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.