Standing up to Dictatorship: From Weimar to Trump.
As a young American teenager, barely 20 years after the end of the Second World War, my family moved to Cologne, West Germany, a city still littered with bomb sites and shrapnel scarred buildings. To learn German, my parents sent me to the Friedrich Schiller Gymnasium, a once prestigious high school renowned for its humanistic education as suggested by its literary namesake. This included the teaching of Hebrew until the Nazis banned it in 1936. As for the school’s last two remaining Jewish pupils, they were kicked out in 1938.
Barely 13 years old at the time, I became obsessed with the Second World War. I devoured every book I could, particularly survivor accounts like Rudolf Vrba’s I Cannot Forgive about his escape from Auschwitz, and Leon Uris’s Mila 18 on the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The concept of resistance fascinated me and undoubtedly shaped my future career as a foreign correspondent reporting conflicts and humanitarian crises worldwide.
A devastated Cologne at the end of World War II.
Historic Archives
A hatred for war but too late to act
Most of my male teachers had served in the Wehrmacht or had been members of the Hitler Jugend, the Nazi party’s youth movement which by 1939 had become mandatory for all 14–18-year-olds. One of the latter was Herr Kitchner, our Latin teacher, who bitterly complained about how, shortly after US troops entered Cologne in March 1945, two GIs who had forced their way into his house and stole his stamp collection
Far more compelling was the story grimly recounted by our arts teacher, whose name escapes me. At barely 17, he was drafted and sent to the hellhole of the Battle for Stalingrad. Weeks later, severely wounded, he was evacuated on one of the last air transports out, most likely saving his life. “We all hated war, but there was nothing you could do. It was too late,” I remember him telling us.
Nazi salutes at the Reichstag in Berlin during the 1930s.
World War II Archives
What would I have done had I been German?
I found myself wondering what I would have done had I been German. Of course, I decided, I would have stood up to the propaganda and lies. But would I really have been that dauntless? That outspoken?
Looking at my classmates, I realised that had we been around a generation earlier, we would have been at war with each other. This included my buddy Michael Lankeit, with whom I often rode back from school. On the other hand, Andreas Schröder, who became a Juso, or Young Socialist, might have ended up in a concentration camp for his left-wing politics. Even Erwin and Manfred, who sat behind me in class and were clearly gay, would have risked incarceration as homosexuals.
Unlike the French, who have never really come to terms with Vichy France’s Nazi collaboration, post-war Germans readily confronted the need to reflect as to why they, as a supposedly civilized people whose country produced the likes of Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller, had allowed the Nazis to take over. Why had so many stood by as the brown-shirts, but also ordinary people, spouted venomous slurs, burned books, vandalized synagogues and beat up, imprisoned and executed those who spoke out?
Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose (Weisse Rose) non-violent German resistance group, guillotined at 21 years old by the Nazis.
WIKIPEDIA
And then, already from 1933 onwards, there was the dispatching of socialists, communists, Jews, Gypsies and other ‘undesirables’ to the concentration camps crudely invented by the US government in its attempted annihilation of Native Americans or Indians during the late 19th century and the British during the Boer Wars in South Africa. Furthermore, over 70,000 mainly German political opponents, such as protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and 21-year-old White Rose student activist Sophie Scholl, were guillotined, hanged, shot or otherwise horribly murdered.
Believing the lies: an excuse for doing nothing
The harsh reality is that most Germans did little or nothing. How could they have believed the lies of the Nazi propaganda machine, which seems little different from what is disseminated on social media today, whether by Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Donald Trump’s own network of unquestioning MAGA supporters? At the same time, somewhat ironically, part of occupied France’s initial armed resistance to the Nazis was launched in 1941 by German Wehrmacht deserters and former Spanish Civil War activists, both with first-hand experience of political repression.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, the Bonn government dedicated each VE Day on 8 May, the official end of World War II in Europe, for schools to help us young people learn what had led to the rise of Nazism through films, exhibitions and discussions. We were encouraged to read and to open our minds as to how the rest of the world viewed what had happened.
Adolf Hitler: It took him less than two months to destoy democracy in Germany.
Historic WWII Archives
As these candid reflections reminded us, Adolf Hitler was democratically appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Nevertheless, following the Reichstag fire less than a month later, he exploited the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic by manipulating the perceived state of emergency as an excuse to suspend constitutional governance and civil liberties. By August 1934, Hitler and his Nazi party were in control with himself the designated “Führer.”
“We let it happen,” Herr Hove, our class teacher, explained. “The German people could have done something, but we didn’t. We were all responsible. And we are still responsible today.”
Alternatif fuer Deutschland election programme. February 2025
Alternatif fuer Deutschland website
Most Germans are still worried about dictatorship – and disinformation
Decades later, Germany still harbours a degree of guilt and “never again” soul searching. This partially explains why there is such concern about the rise of the far right and populist Alternatif fur Deutschland (AfD) party, which garnered 20.8 percent of the vote in last month’s elections making it the country’s second largest political party. During the communist period of the 1950s leading up to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, the German Democratic Republic – as East Germany was officially called and where Putin served as a KGB agent – consistently refused to assume any responsibility for Hitler’s rise preferring instead to blame West German ‘fascists’.
This was a message heavily plugged by the GDR including the communist party’s own version of the Hitler Youth, the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), or Free German Youth. There is no such nationwide organization today, but a significant proportion of AfD ballots were cast in this very same eastern part of the country by disillusioned young men with no perceived future. By voting AfD they were seeking simplistic fault-finding reasons for their predicaments, such as joblessness or the feeling of no longer being included. Hence their readiness to blame refugees and migrants, both designated targets for the AfD’s own public information outreach.
A similar phenomenon is emerging in Italy, France, Hungary and other countries where populism is growing. It is little different across the Atlantic. On two recent trips to the United States, one before, the other after the November 2024 elections, I found the same sort of griping, not so much about Ukraine or the Middle East – many Americans could not care less what happens elsewhere in the world - but rather high supermarket prices, the lack of well-paying jobs, illegal migration and allegedly unfair foreign trade. What they appeared to want were simple issues with simple solutions, regardless of whether substantiated or not, but precisely what Trump was – and still is - promising.
Jeff Danziger Trump-Putin Cartoon
Jeff Danziger
Are Americans any different in 2025 from Germans in 1933?
As a young American living in West Germany during the 1960s, I obviously did not feel responsible for what happened during the Nazi period. But are we Americans any different today? Are we standing up to the rantings of a populist politician extolling a complete dystopian fiction through lies and blatant misinformation as propagated once again in President Trump’s rambling State of the Union speech with nearly 60 mainly Republican ovations?
Of course, such blatant lying is not new. According to the BBC, New York Times and other news organizations that still embrace traditional reporting, the fact-checking of Trump speeches reveal a plethora of incorrect or misleading statements. One constantly perpetuated myth, publicly corrected by French President Emmanuel Macron on his recent visit to Washington, is that America has provided Ukraine with the most military support, notably 350 billion dollars’ worth. The actual figure ranges from 119.7 billion dollars (Kiel Institute) to 182.8 billion (US Department of Defence), less than what the Europeans have loaned or granted.
Russian president and autocrat Vladimir Putin.
Novosty
Many Americans are poorly informed
The danger is that many Americans are poorly informed but fail to realise it. Parts of the United States are increasingly afflicted by what is known as “news deserts,” mainly rural areas which no longer have critical local press – many newspapers have closed over the past two decades through loss of advertising to the Internet - to keep tabs on politicians, regardless which party. As one friend from Oregon pointed out, there is no longer any civilized, open debate, once an American tradition. There are only two sides, and no middle ground.
Particularly threatening is that even before Trump, many schools in states like Texas and Florida have long stopped properly teaching history, current affairs and even geography and science leaving Americans ignorant. Many, too, no longer read other than what they find on their smartphones.
Reminiscent of Germany’s banning or burning of books during the 1930s, allegedly contentious literature has been removed from public school boards of education, teachers and parents for dealing with uncomfortable issues from democracy and racism to foreign affairs, LG+ issues and Darwinism. Even local libraries have been forced to drop books considered subversive, such as Canadian Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, or Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini’s 1993 The Kite Runner.
America's 47th president, Donald Trump, who is increasingly accused by critics of undermining the US Constitution.
The White House
Little questioning of the President’s undermining of the US Constitution
The sad reality is that growing numbers of Americans no longer bother to inform themselves properly, relying instead on whatever comes up in social media, right-wing religious radio stations or major TV networks and podcasts, such as Fox News, propagating fake news, misinformation and outright propaganda. Not unlike the Montanan rancher who demanded to know from me why Americans should care about foreign reporting, their only vision of what is happening is based on the one-sided information fed to them by politicians or influencers they believe in.
A President who bullies and intimidates
The fact, too, that President Trump is undermining the US Constitution, siding with war criminals and obliterating all that the United States is supposed to stand for as leader of the “Free World” are no longer considered issues. Few MAGA supporters seem bothered by Trump’s bullying tactics by seeking to intimidate polite Canadians, threatening a land grab in Greenland, a self-governed and autonomous country considered part of Denmark, or taking over Gaza to build a garish Mediterranean Riviera while kicking out its two million inhabitants.
Russian troops in Ukraine.
So where do we stand today with Trump imposing tariffs on America’s friends, or publicly embracing a Russian hoodlum, who, like Hitler, has been steadily murdering, incarcerating or intimidating any citizen who dares speak out, including the defenestration of uppity oligarchs from sixth floor windows who question his authority?
While claiming that he is anti-war, Trump seems quite happy to label President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator and responsible for what is happening in Ukraine. He frighteningly ignores that Putin is the one whose illegal invasion has resulted in hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed or wounded, while missiles and drones continue to rain on hapless civilians.
Appalling as it is, an astonishing number of US citizens, including elected Congressmen and Senators, have decided that it is okay for the man holding the Office of the President to reign as an abuser of both women and American war veterans, while abandoning all sense of basic decency. Or to jettison old friends and allies by the wayside, while blaming everyone else for America’s supposed ills, whether migrants, an independent press or foreign dignitaries who dare to contradict him.
MAGA supporters of Donald Trump in the United States
Yale University
A real risk of dictatorship
President Trump is fast emerging as an unbridled Manchurian Candidate who, in the name of “effective government” and “making America great again” is putting hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens out of work, condemning many to poverty. He is also subverting everything from basic health care and USAID, once Washington’s most effective foreign ‘soft power’ institution, to the US Fish and Wildlife Service trained not only to maintain the nation’s national parks but to fight increasing wildfires aggravated by climate change. (See Global Geneva article on wildfires)
Perhaps worst of all, he is steadily undermining what the Founding Fathers held so dear, notably the government’s crucial system of checks and balances, including the courts. In less than six weeks, too, America’s 47th president and his appointed cohorts have managed to install an inside regime of very rich, corrupt people, who are in it for themselves and who do not represent, or respect, the interests of the average American other than if it serves their purpose.
What we are facing is the very real risk that Trump, who claims to only ‘joke’ about becoming king, is seeking to impose his own form of dictatorship to the detriment of a long history of direct democracy dating back to the 1630s. And we are letting it happen. Just like the Germans did back in 1933.
Global Geneva editor Edward Girardet is a veteran foreign correspondent and author with over 40 years of experience covering wars, humanitarian crises and human rights issues worldwide.