Comment by photonthug
1 day ago
To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Behind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.
That's a good podcast that gets across that most of the Nazis really were just dense thugs.
One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power. Weimer Germany was run by the social democrats. These people were basically 'center left.' They ended up in control after the 1919 revolution that got rid of the Kaiser, and ruled via coalition government with other centrist and center-right parties as junior members.
In general people's complaints were 1) land reform because especially in Prussia most of the land was still owned by massive landowners (Junkers) and most peasants were tenant farmers and 2) better working conditions in industry for the working poor 3) some way to get out of the economic crisis that was bad even before the depression in Germany.
The social democrats failed to deliver any of this. And mostly they spend their entire time in power battling with the Communists. This included hiring freekorps, which were paramility groups that roamed the German countryside after the war and eventually turned into brownshirts, to work with the police to attack communists. There was already a ton of state sponsored terror in the 1920s directed almost entirely at the left.
Support for the social democrats and other center parties collapsed and in the 1932 election, the nazis and communists were the big winners almost entirely at the expense of the social democrats. The center parties decided that working with the communists was absolutely beyond the pale and thought that the nazis would be more easy to manipulate, so they decided to work with Hitler and made him chancellor. Once the nazis had their foot in the door, as it were, and given that they had contempt for democracy and the rule of law, they used every dirty trick they could after that to consolidate power.
> One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power.
Just to clarify for other folks, there are many episodes re: Nazis, but it also covers everything from Khmer Rouge to more modern coverage that's truly the more banal kind of evil, covering the worst and most destructive grifters. So while it's definitely kinda preoccupied with fascism, there's another through-line with dis/misinformation, etc etc.
I do agree with your basic criticism though, fair to say the general show format for dictators is 1st part bio which is frequently unremarkable, then the 2nd part is appalling crimes. How society was complicit/tolerant enough to allow the decline to happen is usually sidelined. On the other hand though, it's kind of always the same and pretty simple. To the extent it's not simply hidden or covered up, it works like this. After things are definitely very shitty, whatever misguided optimism folks can muster is usually all about "harming the out-group will help somehow!". (It doesn't.)
But the astute dictator (or their advisors) can rely on and exploit that kind of tribalism. Common sense, static value-systems, or any sensitivity to blatantly hypocritical statements/behaviour etc just are not things that the common person can really hang on to once they are angry/impoverished/aggrieved/hungry