The Brain Dead Biden-Hindenburg Comparison
Using Hitler's Rise As An Anti-Biden Argument From The Left Is History Rewritten
In April 1932, Paul von Hindenburg defeated Adolph Hitler in the German Presidential Election, keeping the future Führer from becoming Germany’s head of state. Nine months later, Hindenburg appointed Hitler to be Germany’s chancellor, putting him in the position to quickly rise to become perhaps history’s most reviled figure.
It has become canon recently among many online leftists to use this historical anecdote as an excuse not to vote for Joe Biden against Donald Trump in November. Their argument, which was similar to the one used to justify voting for John Anderson in 1980, Ralph Nader in 2000, and Jill Stein in 2016 is that a Biden win won’t stop the rise of fascism in the United States because he, like Hindenburg, is and will be complacent in fascism taking power.
This type of argument is one of my biggest pet peeves – a trigger as they say – historical revisionism. It bastardizes the truth of what happened in pre-Nazi Germany to serve a political interest, and exonerate the main culprits in Hitler’s rise to power, the German voters themselves.
Pre-Nazi Germany
To begin to understand why this comparison is factually incorrect information, you have to first understand the type of democracy the Weimer Republic, the pre-Nazi German system, was. It was not like ours. It greatly resembled the current system that exists in democracies like Israel and India, where there is an elected president who serves as head of state with limited or no power unless authorized as an emergency power. The head of the government, and the bulk of the political power, lay with the chancellor, the name Germans give to the prime minister. In the United States, the president is both head of state and government. Presidents in Weimer Germany were elected by popular vote in separate elections. The chancellor would come from the party that won the legislative election and/or could form a government.
In the Weimer Germany example, Hindenburg won the presidential election in April 1932, defeating Hitler and Communist Ernst Thälmann. A separate legislative election was held in July and the Nazis won with 37 percent of the vote. That gave Hitler the first right to form a government. However, the Nazis were unable to, so a new election was called that November. This is where the German Left, as it is doing now in the United States, let perfect be the enemy of good and allowed gripes and loyalty to foreign influence to blind them to reality. The Nazis lost seats in the November election, though they were still the winning party with 33 percent of the vote. The Communists under Thälmann gained seats. The Communists could have sought some concessions to form a government with the centrist and center-left parties and freeze the Nazis out of government, but instead, on the orders of the Soviet leadership in Moscow they did not.
1930s-era communists believed as American leftists do now, that by allowing centrist/moderate governments to collapse in democratic nations, communist systems would rise from the chaos.
Communist Third Period
In 1928, Communist International, the organization of communist parties nationwide, issued a decree calling for communists to reject alliances with moderate parties, calling them “social fascists.” The global communism advocacy organization, run by the Soviet leadership, believed the impending Great Depression and rise of pro-labor movements worldwide meant that capitalism was in its last throes and that moderate and centrist left parties were propping up a dying system (sound familiar?). This echoes the arguments the left makes against “neoliberalism” today. 1930s-era communists believed as American leftists do now, that by allowing centrist/moderate governments to collapse in democratic nations, communist systems would rise from the chaos.
Germany provided a test case for this theory. The country had been in the thick of an economic and political crisis. Suffering from the economic pain of the Great Depression and punishing war reparations from World War I, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, a centrist, used emergency powers to enact unpopular economic reforms that triggered massive inflation and the collapse of the government and new elections in 1930. The Nazi Party, which before 1930 had only eight seats in the 608-seat Reichstag, the German parliament, came in second in the election, increasing its caucus to 1071. The Communists also gained 23 seats. The rise of the far right and far left created a stalemate where the governing Social Democratic and Centre parties were unable to build a majority. The political turmoil led to Hindenburg and Brüning governing with emergency powers leading up to the 1932 elections. They instituted policies that angered both the far left and the far right. Seeing the far right as a bigger threat, Hindenburg dismissed Brüning and replaced him with Franz von Papen, a conservative from an aristocratic background who had some support in the moderate and leftist wings of the Nazi Party.
After the July 1932 election and again after elections in November, Thälmann could have easily formed a government with the center-left parties but refused to, largely due to the Third Period decree from Communist International. At the time the Communists and leftists were engaging in regular violent clashes with Nazis, most notably in the northern region of Schleswig-Holstein culminating in the Alton Bloody Sunday riot just two weeks before the July 1932 elections. The violence led the German government to declare martial law in the region ahead of the elections. The Communists took issue with the declaration, noting that the Nazis had triggered the violence, but as was mentioned, Papen feared the Nazis far more because they were the largest party in the Reichstag and likely to remain so after the election. Nevertheless, the Communists believed that the violence would work in their favor and that voters, like those experiencing martial law in Schleswig-Holstein, would side with them.
They gravely miscalculated. The strife backfired on the Communists.
Schleswig-Holstein gave the Nazis their highest margin in the country, over 50 percent of the vote, largely due to the violence. It was the biggest swing toward the Nazis anywhere in Germany. The results should have been a humbling moment for the Communists, but Thälmann’s party did gain 12 seats elsewhere in the country in July, further emboldening their strategy. The Communists, delusionally believing the political winds were in their favor, forced a new election, proposing a vote of no confidence in Papen’s emergency government, which passed. The government collapsed and Germans went to the polls again in November.
The November 1932 Reichstag Elections
Communists felt the economic and political situation had become so fraught – unemployment was in the double digits and was noticeably worse among those who were part of labor unions – they would do much better in a new election once voters saw the benefits of a potential communist government. They did gain 11 seats in the election at the expense of the center-left parties and, notably in Saxony, the Nazi Party. It appeared, at least for the moment, that the Third Period strategy was beginning to bear fruit.
Nevertheless, the Nazis still finished on top in November, and Hitler sought to form a government. The results, along with the Communists plainly stating they would not sit in a coalition government with Papen, led the sitting Chancellor to seek out Gregor Strasser, the leader of the Nazi Party’s left wing, and attempt to form a unity government that would leave Hitler and his far-right faction in a weakened position. Hitler promptly removed Strasser from his position in the party and sought to form a coalition with Papen on his own.
This left Germany, now considerably weakened by the Great Depression and nearly three years of political instability, in chaos. Papen feared the radical left and right would benefit from this and set the country on a course to civil war the far right would win. Papen agreed to work with Hitler, hoping to marginalize him in a coalition government, and asked Hindenburg to use his presidential power to appoint Hitler chancellor, since his party was the biggest in the Reichstag, and Papen vice chancellor.
Could Hindenburg Have Not Appointed Hitler?
Yes, with a but.
This is where the modern leftist argument against Biden comes in. Hindenburg could have refused Papen’s suggestion to make Hitler chancellor, but it would have only delayed the inevitable. Hitler, with Papen, had enough votes to form a government and if the Reichstag had voted down the alliance at Hindenburg’s urging, it would have created a constitutional crisis and ultimately would have led to the same thing that happened with Hitler’s appointment: new elections that the Nazis would have won handily.
In the March 1933 elections, held only five weeks after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazis won the plurality in every German region except for Cologne and Koblenz in the Rhine Valley.2 Much of that was due to the violent repression and propaganda campaign employed by the Nazis in the weeks before the election, especially after the Reichstag Fire five days before the vote. Papen was seeking to find a way to neutralize the Nazi’s sudden and terrifying ascent.
The Communists mistook Papen’s weakness as an opportunity for them but were too blinded by idealism that emanated largely from outside Germany to see the reality of what was happening inside it. The Communists wrongly believed they had a strong enough movement to fight off Nazis in a civil war if it came to it. Future failures of Communists in Spain and Greece to defeat rising fascism in the later part of the decade showed this to be a delusion. Germany was on a path to fascism the moment enough German voters had aligned themselves with the Nazi Party to give them the political and social power to inflict violence and repercussions on their opposition and force the nation to bend to their will.
Some leftists may believe we are already at that point with Trump; that Trumpism will win whether Biden is reelected or not because liberals aren’t strong enough to fight them, but they’re wrong. First, liberals are the *only* ones truly fighting them, for better or worse. They are the ones suing the Republican state governments’ oppressive policies in courts and prosecuting 1/6 rioters and Donald Trump himself. Leftists meanwhile are spending most of their time fighting the Democratic establishment as proxies for the right, in the same way German Communists fought Papen believing him to be the more imminent threat. It is true the Democrats are working with the right on issues the right has more popular support with, such as crime and immigration, but the left isn’t exactly breeding confidence in their ability to win those issues and keep the American people from electing fascists to office to fix them the same way the Germans did.
Second, we don’t have the same system Weimer Germany did. The President is far more powerful and can, just as he has, use his power to mitigate the creeping fascism from taking over the country. We may not be able to save the “red” states, and the Supreme Court will remain a roadblock toward progress, but by ensuring Democrats control the institutions in Washington voters have the power to give them, namely the presidency and Congress, we can protect federal law and “blue” states, and work on progressing in the “red” ones.
That is a privilege Germans in the waning days of the Weimer Republic did not have. We should use it and be thankful for it.
In the 1930 election, the Nazis performed the strongest in East Prussia which became a stronghold for them in future elections. No longer part of Germany, most of the territory that makes up the former East Prussia is today located in Russia’s Kaliningrad Oblast
I went to Cologne in 2014 and the city prides itself as being the only major German city to never vote for the Nazis.
The far left’s approach here is not that different from why MAGAs support Trump - it is not logic or reason or even real belief - it is departure from reality borne out of general frustration with how hard life can be with solutions that are elusive.
You nailed it, Nick! Thank you.