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What We Misunderstand About the Nazis

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In his insightful essay “We Misunderstood the Nazis” in The Free Press, Matti Friedman argues that the way we learn about the Holocaust has done little to prevent its reoccurrence. Thanks to billion-dollar investments in museums, documentaries, and school curricula, Westerners know all about the “logistics” of National Socialism: Zyklon B, death marches, cruel torture. What we aren’t taught is why the Holocaust happened. As a result, antisemitism is potent once again.

Friedman proposes that instead of focusing on what the Nazis did, young people should learn about why they did it. He also forwards an explanation: “It is historically quite common for members of a society to identify the evil that preoccupies them and to conflate that evil with Jews, then declare that acting against evil means acting against Jews.” This is undeniably correct.

Yet given the thousands-of-years-old legacy of anti-Semitism in the West, it’s also worth asking why its historical pattern flared up in Germany during the 1930s. After all, Jews were fully integrated into German society during the early 20th century. What was the powerful evil that preoccupied Germans and led them to turn against their neighbors—and might it explain the resurgence of anti-Jewish hate that we see today?

It’s always difficult to identify the causes of complex historical events. Perhaps that’s why so many of the films and books about the Holocaust don’t move beyond the facts. But Friedman is right: A merely factual account of Nazi atrocities does nothing to help us identify the forces that motivated them. To learn from history, we have to accept the risks that come when we move from facts to causes.

Like virtually all historical catastrophes, the Nazi rise to power could not have taken place without the assistance of ordinary people. This means that one of the risks of analyzing their success is that you might discover that many people today are participating in the same murderous dynamic that engulfed Germany in the 1930s—and you might be one of them.

As F.A. Hayek, a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian economist, wrote in 1944, “Many who think themselves infinitely superior to the aberrations of Nazism and sincerely hate all its manifestations, work at the same time for ideals whose realisation would lead straight to the abhorred tyranny.”

Hayek had a unique perspective on the ideas that enabled the Nazis to seize power in Germany. As an economist in Vienna during the 1920s, he debated political and economic ideas in the city’s famed coffeehouse kriese, or “circles.” The center of Viennese intellectual life, the kriese were hosted by luminaries such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper, and Kurt Gödel. They debated the great ideas of the German-speaking world over coffee and beer. Peak civilization.

When Hayek accepted a professorship at the London School of Economics in the early 1930s, he noticed something very curious about English intellectual life: The most popular English ideas had simply been translated from German with a 10-year delay. As Germany veered toward totalitarianism, Hayek grew concerned. He saw that if the English continued to import political ideology from Germany, they would enable the rise of a murderous dictator, just as the Germans had.

Alarmed, Hayek set out to write The Road to Serfdom as part of his “war effort.” He wanted to show the English-speaking world that “in Germany it was largely people of goodwill, men who were admired and held up as models in this country, who prepared the way, if they did not actually create, the forces which now stand for everything they detest.”

As the West bears witness to a resurgence of one of the world’s oldest hatreds, it’s time to risk asking what ideas paved the way for Nazi supremacy.

Hayek’s answer will be surprising to those who have been taught that Nazism was just capitalism on steroids. In fact, Hayek argues that National Socialism is simply an ethnically charged variant of traditional international socialism.

As Hitler himself proclaimed: “We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our Socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the State on the basis of race solidarity.”

By the time Hitler rose to power by preaching his race-inflected vision of social justice, Germany’s constitutional traditions were too weak to stand in his way. In fact, they had already been eroded by decades of socialist policies.

As Hayek explains, when voters in democratic Germany demanded that the government provide for the welfare of the people, they empowered it to take resources through taxation and redistribute them to the needy. Yet democratic institutions struggled to accommodate this demand.

After all, there has never been an objective way to figure out what a welfare state should do. As anyone familiar with American politics knows, people tend to have different opinions about how their tax money should be spent.

Often, those opinions reflect deeply held values that cannot be reconciled. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

Unsurprisingly, the German parliament frequently found itself deadlocked in the late 1920s and early 1930s, unable to find a “compromise” between the passionately felt desires of the electorate. As legislation stalled, voters grew restless, frustrated by their “do-nothing” representatives. They thought that only a conspiracy could explain the holdup and longed for a strongman who wouldn’t let legal technicalities stop him from putting the German people first.

Sound familiar?

Of course, there are those who find this argument unconvincing. Clearly, the United States hasn’t slid into totalitarianism, and it’s doled out plenty of welfare in the nearly 80 years since The Road to Serfdom hit the shelves. By implication, Hayek must have got it wrong.

But this objection simply doesn’t reflect an understanding of how historical forces work. No one can predict the future—and Hayek, being no fool, wasn’t trying to. Rather, he was warning the English-speaking world about a dynamic that steadily erodes the rule of law, leaving society at the mercy of those who excel in the application of raw power.

Though justice is a virtue, policies inspired by social justice pit citizens against one another. Today, some want to use tax money to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. Others want taxpayers to assume billions of dollars in student debt. Still others wish to use the power of government to protect American industry.

Each of these interest groups sees the ballot box as an opportunity to impose their values on the entire nation. Winner takes all.

In a powerful speech delivered to The Federalist Society in November of 2023, Bari Weiss argues that “antisemitism is a warning system. It is a sign that the society itself is breaking down.” In a broken society, citizens are no longer unified by the shared project of the common good. Instead, they are locked in a politics of special interests, one fueled by their deepest moral convictions. As tensions rise, they turn to a familiar scapegoat.

This is no slippery slope. It is simply where we stand.

Image credit: public domain