"Wait Calmly" a German article from Feb 2017 about the Trump-Hitler comparison [View all]
Is there reason to worry? No, thought Nikolaus Sieveking, an employee at Hamburgs World Economy Archive. "I find the act of viewing Hitlers chancellorship as a sensational event to be childish enough that I will leave that to his loyal followers," he wrote in his diary on Jan. 30, 1933.
Like Sieveking, many Germans didnt initially recognize this date as a dramatic turning point. Few sensed what Hitlers appointment as chancellor actually meant, and many reacted to the event with shocking indifference.
The chancellor of the presidential cabinet had changed twice in 1932 -- Heinrich Brüning was replaced in early June by Franz von Papen, who was replaced in early December by Kurt von Schleicher. People had almost gotten used to this tempo. Why should the Hitler government be anything more than just an episode? In the Wochenschau news programs shown in cinemas, the swearing-in of the new cabinet came last, after the major sporting events.
This, despite the fact that Hitler had plainly explained in "Mein Kampf" and countless speeches before 1933 what he wanted to do once in power: to abolish the democratic "system" of Weimar Germany, to "eradicate" Marxism (by which he meant both social democracy and communism) and to "remove" the Jews from Germany. As for foreign policy, he made no secret of the fact that he wanted to revise the Versailles Treaty and that his long-term goal was the conquering of "Lebensraum in the East."
Read more: https://www.zeit.de/wissen/geschichte/2017-02/adolf-hitler-chancellor-appointment-anniversary
This is a great article that I've held onto since 2017. I never thought that we would be going through this again, but here we are. The first Orange Admin was a dry run. Now they know what to do to destroy the remaining guardrails.