Our Weimar Republic

Bruce Walker / American Thinker

The horror of National Socialism is so profound and universally acknowledged that comparing our current political and social climate with the rise of the Nazis is sometimes too often and too easily done.  The radical left four decades ago observed that Hitler called for “Law and Order,” just as conservatives were doing then.  Conservatives have noted that the rise of paganism in American culture and the deconstruction of moral values pushed by the left hearken back to another grim legacy of Nazism. 

There are, however, some chilling suggestions in politics and government today that draw memories of the last days of that failed German republic.  Consider two of the most notorious changes in the German nation as it moved from Weimar Germany to Nazi Germany: the destruction of the sovereignty of state governments and the replacement of the national legislature with unchecked executive power.

A vital but usually ignored part of the Nazi revolution in Germany was the reduction of robust and independent German states to the status of mere appendages of the federal government.  At the time, outside observers found this the most critical aspect of Nazi government.  As early as 1939, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, in his book Hitler’s Reich, noted that “[f]ederal Germany is gone.  The Gleichschaltung law disposes of the prerogatives of the separate States, and Nazis leaders have been named Statthalter, with power from Berlin to dismiss State governments should they not prove fully amenable.”  Clarence Street wrote in 1941: “One of Hitler’s first acts was to abolish the German federal system.  Once he had removed the powerful brake which state rights provide, totalitarianism sped on.”  Oswald Dutch, in his 1941 book Hitler’s 12 Apostles, wrote: “[The Nazis] systematically set about dissolving the individual provincial governments, eliminating the provincial assembles, and uniting all powers in the hands of the central government in Berlin.”  

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