Behind the furore over Elon Musk’s op–ed in the German newspaper Die Welt encouraging support for the far-right AfD, his Nazi ‘salute’, and his more recent surprise video appearance at an AfD rally urging Germans to forget “past guilt”, there are even more disturbing parallels between the new administration in Washington and events in Germany in the 1930s.
On 8 January, 12 days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States, an article appeared in the US magazine The Atlantic: ‘How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days’. Trump’s name doesn’t appear at all in the piece by Timothy Ryback, a historian and an authority on 1930s Germany. But joining the dots is not difficult.
The use of the word ‘dismantled’ in the title is telling because Project 2025 – the product of a right-wing movement explicitly intended to “take down the Deep State” and said to be the blueprint for Trump’s second term – talks extensively of “dismantling” America’s institutions. Two of its co-authors are Brendan Carr, now head of the Federal Communications Commission, and Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget.
Remember Trump pledging to ‘drain the swamp’? This was Adolf Hitler’s phrase. He talked of draining the ‘parlamentarischen Sumpf,’ when he found himself hemmed in by constitutional guardrails to which he “responded as he invariably did when confronted with dissenting opinions or inconvenient truths: He ignored them and doubled down”, according to Ryback. Sound familiar?
Germany 1933
On 30 January 1933 at 11.30 am on a chilly Monday morning in Berlin, Ryback writes, Hitler swore an oath to uphold the constitution. After lunch at the Hotel Kaiserhof, he returned to the Reich Chancellery for his first formal meeting with his nine cabinet ministers:
“Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with ‘jubilation’, then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists. At this point he turned to his main agenda item: the empowering law that, he argued, would give him the time (four years, according to the stipulations laid out in the draft of the law) and the authority necessary to make good on his campaign promises to revive the economy, reduce unemployment, increase military spending, withdraw from international treaty obligations, purge the country of foreigners he claimed were ‘poisoning’ the blood of the nation, and exact revenge on political opponents. ‘Heads will roll in the sand,’ Hitler had vowed at one rally.”
Trump is similarly obsessed with crowd sizes, fills his government with ultra-loyalists and plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants that he too claims are “poisoning the blood of our country”. He is bent on exacting revenge on his political opponents, including members of his own party. Germany withdrew from the League of Nations in October 1933. Trump has already pulled the US out of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord.
Where Hitler spoke of lebensraum or ‘living space’ and annexed Austria in 1938, Trump talks of making Canada the 51st state and hints at military action to occupy Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone.
The rise of the Nazis
I also looked back at the BBC documentary series: Rise of the Nazis, (available on iPlayer) first broadcast in 2019, where Ryback, a director at the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, was one of the contributors. Episode two begins with a narrator explaining:
“Hitler has no interest in the boring day-to-day details of running a country. He has no interest in the opinions of experts and refuses to read briefings. Instead, he tasks his team with a simple assignment: destroy democracy and make him a dictator.”
These are also traits long associated with Trump. He cares little for detailed policy development, disdains expert opinion and prefers to accept the views of hosts on Fox News rather than official briefings. He, like Hitler, is also given to long rambling monologues. Both men totally dominate their own parties. Republicans control Congress and the Supreme Court.
Trump’s admiration for Hitler isn’t in doubt. Michael Bender from The Wall Street Journal claimed in his book: Frankly, We Did Win This Election, that Trump had told his former chief of staff that “Hitler did a lot of good things”.
In a 1990 interview with Vanity Fair, Trump’s first ex-wife Ivana (who died in 2022 and is buried at Trump’s Bedminster Golf course) said the future president kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches in their bedroom. Later, a friend confirmed he had given Trump the book: My New Order (still available on Amazon).
His own vice president JD Vance once remarked to an associate as recently as 2016 that Trump could be “America’s Hitler” and there are worrying signs that he may be right.
The ‘empowering law’
The 53-day ‘dismantling’ of democracy occurred between Hitler’s appointment as chancellor at the end of January and the passing of the notorious empowering law (also known as the Enabling Act of 1933) on 23 March, granting Hitler sweeping powers to rule by decree, bypassing the Reichstag.
This still left an ageing president constitutionally above Hitler. But a year later, just before his death, Hitler persuaded Paul von Hindenburg to approve an act combining the offices of the president and chancellor. Hitler was then the supreme commander of Germany, crucially including the armed forces.
In the US, Trump is already president and commander-in-chief and is making full use of executive orders to bypass Congress and push against the constitution. Joe Biden signed 160 over four years and Trump 220 in his first term. Last week the newly inaugurated president issued more than 200 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations on his first day – several, at least, legally dubious.
According to Time Magazine, two thirds of these executive actions “mirror or partially mirror” proposals from Project 2025, ranging from deregulation measures to aggressive immigration reform.
The problem with government loyalists
In the BBC documentary, it is clear that many of the worst excesses of the Nazi regime came not from Hitler, but from his underlings, keen to show their commitment to the cause. Hitler liked to set people against each other in the belief the most ruthless would rise to the top, something Trump has also been accused of.
The result was that Heinrich Himmler – a relatively unknown police chief in Munich when Hitler first came to power – created the SS, and Herman Göring launched the Gestapo.
It’s no accident that Dachau is close to Munich. A committed anti-Semite who believed in Aryan supremacy, Himmler built the first and longest operating of all Nazi concentration camps in March 1933 on his own initiative – firstly as a ‘re-education’ facility for communists and trade unionists, using the site of a former munitions plant. Dachau later became a training centre for SS guards and a model for all Nazi concentration camps. Hitler approved it all, but the ideas belonged to Himmler to please his boss.
Tom Homan, Trump’s border chief, has denied claims he intends to build concentration camps. But private companies are expected to operate ‘detention centres’ and Texas has already offered land to build ‘deportation facilities’ to handle some of the estimated 13 million undocumented migrants in the US.
What began as a policy of forcing Jews to leave Germany by making life intolerable under Hitler’s persecution, gradually developed into the Holocaust and in July 1941 Göring signed the order for the “final solution”.
At the outset, no one could have foreseen that ‘purging the country of foreigners’ would eventually involve the systematic murder of millions of innocent men, women and children, including his own people. Time will show where Trump’s policy takes us.
Encouraging violence
Trump has pardoned virtually all the 6 January rioters who were charged or convicted by the courts following the violent insurrection he himself provoked and almost certainly helped plan. Pardons covered members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two extreme neo-fascist far-right groups. The new president also directed the Department of Justice to drop all pending cases against suspects accused in the riot.
He has also petulantly stripped his former national security adviser John Bolton and Covid-19 hero Anthony Fauci of their government security team, despite both men facing credible death threats.
It’s worth remembering that:
“Göring also designated the Nazi storm troopers as Hilfspolizei, or ‘deputy police,’ compelling the state to provide the brownshirt thugs with sidearms and empowering them with police authority in their street battles. Diels [the head of Prussia’s political police] later noted that this – manipulating the law to serve his ends and legitimizing the violence and excesses of tens of thousands of brownshirts – was a ‘well-tested Hitler tactic’.”
The Ku Klux Klan are already distributing flyers showing images of Uncle Sam kicking a family of five, including a baby and two young children and exhorting undocumented immigrants in Kentucky to “leave now”.
Using the army to quell dissent
In the early days, when Hitler wondered whether the army could be used to crush any public unrest, his defence minister Werner von Blomberg dismissed the idea out of hand. On watching protesters marching against police brutality and structural racism during his first term, Trump reportedly told law enforcement and military leaders he wanted the military to “beat the f**k” out of protesters and said: “Just shoot them.”
On that occasion it was US attorney general, William Barr, who told the president it couldn’t be done. Trump then said: “Well, shoot them in the leg – or maybe the foot. But be hard on them!”
Note that after Göring visited the headquarters of the Prussian political police in February 1933:
“A Schiesserlass, or ‘shooting decree,’ followed. This permitted the state police to shoot on sight without fearing consequences. ‘I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,’ Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity. ‘When they shoot, it is me shooting,’ Göring said. ‘When someone is lying there dead, it is I who shot them.’”
If significant protests erupted on American streets, who would bet against Trump issuing a similar decree, or his new attorney general Pam Bondi objecting to it?
Big business helped finance Hitler
German industrialists from the likes of munitions manufacturer Krupp and chemical giant IG Farben, are known to have financed the Nazi Party in 1933 to the tune of $30mn in today’s money; and were among those indicted after the war.
Hitler pledged to “dismantle” worker protections and in a secret meeting in Berlin on 20 February addressing a private gathering of leading businessmen, he said: “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.” He also told the men that he would eliminate trade unions and communists. Hitler asked for their financial support and to back his vision for Germany. Gustav Krupp was the first executive to speak at the Berlin meeting, and pledged one million marks ($10mn today).
Trump’s 2024 election campaign received $265mn from Elon Musk’s SpaceX alone (other top donors are here) and his transition fund is said to have raised $200mn, including money from Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sam Altman (OpenAI) with Toyota, Ford and General Motors each chipping in $1mn.
It is a recipe for corruption, yet Trump has dismissed 17 inspectors general from at least a dozen US agencies, who were tasked with rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in government funded programmes.
The economy and tariffs
Trump has made grand promises of a new ‘golden age’ for America and has to deliver significant improvements. Some experts have suggested the swingeing tariffs he pledged to apply to US imports could, along with the detention of millions of immigrants, trigger a depression.
Hitler made similar grand promises and also struggled to make good on them, in particular on tariffs.
“On February 18, the center-left newspaper Vossische Zeitung wrote that despite Hitler’s campaign promises and political posturing, nothing had changed for the average German. If anything, things had gotten worse. Hitler’s promise of doubling tariffs on grain imports had gotten tangled in complexities and contractual obligations. Hugenberg informed Hitler during a cabinet meeting that the ‘catastrophic economic conditions’ were threatening the very ‘existence of the country.’ ‘In the end,’ Vossische Zeitung predicted, ‘the survival of the new government will rely not on words but on the economic conditions.’ For all Hitler’s talk of a thousand-year Reich, there was no certainty his government would last the month.”
If the US experiences a serious slow down, Trump could find his back to the wall in the same way, and it’s hard to predict how he would react.
The Brownshirts
The so-called brownshirts, Sturmabteilung or ‘Storm Troopers’ were the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party and helped Hitler obtain power by inciting violence and disrupting meetings of political opponents. By 1933 it was two million strong, 20 times bigger than the German army, with Ernst Röhm, another Hitler loyalist and anti-Semite as its chief of staff. When Röhm became an embarrassment, he was executed on Hitler’s orders while detained in prison in 1934.
America has no equivalent. But it does have a Nationalist Front, an organisation formed in 2016 by leaders of various neo-Nazi groups, including the National Socialist Movement, with the aim of bringing together white supremacist and white nationalist groups under a common umbrella.
Two of the most prominent far-right groups in the US are the aforementioned Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, both guilty of engaging in political violence. Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has used Oath Keepers for personal security and Roger Stone, one of Trump’s oldest and closest political advisers, had been recorded reciting the initiation oath of the Proud Boys.
In July 2024, Steve Bannon, another Trump adviser, claimed there was a “MAGA army” that would persist until Trump regained the presidency. One group, the National American Patriot and Liberty Movement (NAPALM), think the 2021 insurrection was just the opening battle of an “ongoing second American civil war”. And we also can’t overlook Elon Musk’s 200 million followers on X.
The essential fragility of democracy
Democracy relies on those who seek power observing the conventions developed over centuries in some cases, as well as the law and the constitution. The Nazis were surprised how easy it was to subvert it all:
“Joseph Goebbels, who was present that day [Thursday, 23 March when the Enabling Act was passed] as a National Socialist Reichstag delegate, would later marvel that the National Socialists had succeeded in dismantling a federated constitutional republic entirely through constitutional means.”
Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, was surprised in 1926 after being elected to the Reichstag that he and 11 other Nazis, sworn enemies of the Weimar Republic, had been provided with free first-class train travel and subsidised meals, along with the capacity to disrupt, obstruct, and paralyse democratic structures and processes at will.
“The big joke on democracy”, he observed, “is that it gives its mortal enemies the means to its own destruction”.
If Trump and his associates succeed to destroying democracy – and he is just the man to do it – Americans might regret not paying more attention to Timothy Ryback.
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