With democracy in global decline amid the rise of autocrats and ongoing armed conflict, many politicians and pundits invoke the emergency of fascism a century ago in an attempt to make sense of our current dilemmas. Such comparisons are fraught with problems, not least the unique nature of Nazism’s ambitions for global conquest and genocide.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Richard J. Evans discusses the new urgency surrounding what “made and sustained” the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship as they relate to today’s threats to democratic institutions. Mr. Evans is the author of “Hitler’s People,” which aims to explain what motivated the Nazi leaders and bureaucrats to carry out their crimes. The book was reviewed in The Washington Times on Aug. 1.
“Hitler wanted a world war in order to establish global hegemony. … He wanted perpetual war because only through war and violence, he believed, could a race or a nation keep ahead in the competition for supremacy. Present-day antidemocratic politicians do not on the whole advocate war. Even [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, one who has actually launched a war, I do not believe wants to conquer the whole of Europe,” said Mr. Evans, an eminent scholar of modern Germany.
One area where Mr. Evans sees some similarities between past and present is the desire on the part of autocratic populists, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, to manipulate elections to manufacture the appearance of democratic legitimacy. Still, even here, comparisons with the Nazis must be made cautiously because Hitler violently cracked down on hundreds of thousands of his political opponents in 1933, entirely eliminating the possibility of opposition throughout the rest of his dictatorship.
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