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I picked this book up while in Germany at the Dachau concentration camp. Dachau had an exhibit explaining the rise of Hitler, and it bothered me how it was a slow boil with some similarities to politics in the US today.

It started with grievances that turned into propaganda and lies, and slowly over several years, put Nazis into power. It didn’t happen overnight and was supported by common, everyday people. They had lost sight of what was happening around them. They had become anti democratic and used the “other” as a scapegoat for anything wrong at home. For economic issues, global capitalism was to blame, leading many Germans to prefer nationalism.

They longed for the pre-WWI Germany. And the Nazis falsely promised to bring back the Germany of the past, which was an impossible promise, but one that captured the sentiment of many German people, especially Protestants.

A quote from the book:
“What a nation believes about its past is as least as important as what the past actually was.”

The book is not an easy read. It is dense and thorough. I wish there was a more abridged version.

A summary quote I underlined:

“The Weimar Republic seethed with other resentments and hatreds: the German people were bitterly divided along every conceivable line. Rural people disliked the big cities for breaking with traditions of religion and sexual identity and morality. A postwar tide of refugees, particularly from Eastern Europe, alarmed millions of Germans… The stress of war and revolution had exacerbated antisemitism… Eventually, these different grievances coalesced, especially among the numerically dominant Protestant: Weimar was too Jewish, too Catholic, too modern, too urban - all in all, too morally degenerate. But this cultural code always expresses grievances about something beyond itself. Antisemitism did not spell the end of German democracy or the coming of Hitler, but it did provide a language with which anti democrats could criticize the democratic global order they detested.”



jabitt1's review

3.25
challenging informative slow-paced

tb23's review

4.5
informative reflective slow-paced

Returned to library 
challenging informative reflective medium-paced
challenging dark informative reflective tense medium-paced
challenging dark informative slow-paced
challenging dark informative reflective sad fast-paced

A solid chronicle of one of the most riveting and puzzling developments in history. The last few chapters were cumbersome; many characters tried to manipulate Hitler, or to manipulate other characters close to Hitler, but it was too convoluted to keep track of all of them and the narrative itself started feeling tired, even exasperated by the incompetence and shortsightedness of the Weimar politicians, so much so that those feelings flowed to the reader. By the last few pages -- where the author expertly summarizes his key points, answering the key question of the book in a substantive and original way -- I was happy for the book to be over.

List of similarities between Trump's America and Hitler's Germany, as gleaned from Hett:
-vote share. The Nazis only got as high as 37 percent in the elections, aka Trump base levels
-allergy to truth. In Germany, many people couldn't look truth in the face, clutching on to the "stab in the back" myth invented by Hindenburg and other conservatives that they lost WWI due to home front betrayal by Jews and socialists and republicans.
-right-wing fake news media spreading this allergy to truth
-"...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods." -Hitler, Mein Kampf. Trump must've studied this hard
-Trump being a little POS narcissist, just like Hitler, who remembered personal insults for decades, and just like Goebbels, who pretended in his diary that an entire derby crowd didn't jeer at him
-Christian conservatives trying to appease Hitler/Trump to save capitalism / keep workers' wages down
informative reflective tense slow-paced