> ********
> On 30 January 1933 Hitler became the prime minister of
> Germany. This was not inevitable at all. Two months
> earlier, in November 1932, the Social Democratic Party
> (SPD) won 7.2 million votes and the Communist Party
> (KPD) 6 million. So the two organisations between them
> got 13.2 million votes, while the Nazi vote was 11.7
> million, i.e. 1.5 million votes less.
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/2000/millennium/chap08.htm
That's quite true. Still, the Nazi Party was the largest party in the Reichstag at that point, which set it up for the Hindenberg maneuver. Why couldn't the parties which claimed to be the voice of the workers, which each claimed to be armed with the brilliant, nearly infallible insights and wisdom of the great Marx, prevent this situation from occurring? Why couldn't they bury their differences and cooperate to stop the Nazi advance (temporarily and slightly depressed in the results of the 1932 election, but their real leap forward had occurred in 1930)?
I don't think the answer is any secret, but it is rather embarrassing to Marxist-Leninists, I think.
> The Nazis crushed the opposition because they had
> State power given to them by conservatives like
> Hindenberg AND because rank and file lefties were not
> sufficiently free of the authoritarian personality
> character structures which they had been brought up
> with, their resistance to the Nazi domination lacked
> the capacity for self-organization which could have
> effectively challenged State authority.
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1969/human.htm
I'm not sure how good an explanation Fromm's "authoritarian personality" theory provides (perhaps it is partially true, but there was a lot more to it, I think). But of course President Hindenberg did appoint Hitler Chancellor. Again, the question is, how did the situation get to this point? Where was the leadership on the left that would have headed it off? If the Communists were so prescient about the Nazi threat as Charles claims, why were they so ineffective against it?
One thing that has to be kept in mind is that the Weimar constitution in fact had built into it its own suicide pill, in the form of Article 48, which gave the president the ability to decree emergency legislation and use the armed forces to "restore order," in addition to his other powers of dissolving parliament and nominating chancellors. These presidential powers were fundamental to the process of Hitler becoming Chancellor.
All of this was very different from the U.S. Constitution, of course, and needs to be taken into account if one wants to compare the course of events in Weimar Germany with the U.S. situation.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt