On the night of Feb. 27, 1933, an arsonist attacked the Reichstag, Germany’s historic parliamentary building. It was a critical moment in the country’s collapse from democracy to dictatorship. Today, 92 years later, there are important lessons for our own democracy in the attack and its aftermath.
Germany became a democracy with a written constitution in 1919. The 48th Article of this constitution allowed the constitution itself to be suspended in a national emergency. The article was meant to be a safeguard. If time was short and swift action was needed, the president could invoke it to avoid getting slowed down by routine political procedures.
Article 48 rested on two good-faith assumptions: first, it would only be used to save the system in which it existed; and second, it would always be rescinded once everything was back to normal.
To Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, though, Article 48 was just a loophole.
When a solitary Communist attacked the Reichstag in a misguided attempt at protest, the Nazis immediately weaponized the media to spread the lie that the fire was part of a massive Communist plot. They also lobbied the president, Paul von Hindenburg, to use Article 48 to pass their “Reichstag Fire Decree.” This decree would suspend civil liberties and the freedom of the press — but they called it a “defensive measure” for the “protection of the people.” Such wording was meant to capitalize on the widespread lack of trust in democracy among the German public.
Hindenburg was a conservative who was willing to work with Hitler because of his large popular following. Like many others, though, he could only take Hitler so seriously. He saw him as an erratic and eccentric political outsider who’d be easy to control. His aspirations — to lead a dictatorship and to remove Jews from society, among other things — seemed ludicrously far-fetched.
What’s more, Germany was the seat of the Enlightenment, a capital of European culture, and the home of more than 30 Nobel laureates. There was too much history for anyone to dismantle, let alone a charlatan like Hitler. These consoling thoughts made it easier to believe that the Nazis posed a limited threat to the country.
The Reichstag Fire Decree was passed on Feb. 28. It put the Nazis within touching distance of legally establishing the dictatorship that would bring about World War II, the Holocaust, and the near-total destruction of their own country.
Historians rightly caution against describing MAGA as fascist or Nazi (despite the movement’s growing penchant for Nazi salutes). But there are overlaps between Germany in the moments after the Reichstag fire and the United States in the present that can’t be ignored.
Conservatives have allied themselves with a leader who appears to be an eccentric outsider. This leader is open about his aspirations to suspend the Constitution and to replace democracy with an authoritarian system built around him, the glorious individual — but these aspirations can seem too far-fetched to worry about. The media is being weaponized to sow confusion, fear, and hate among the public, and there’s a widespread lack of trust in democracy.
If these overlaps are cause for alarm, the Reichstag fire also shows us that democracy’s collapse is far from inevitable.
Decisive public and political responses could still have stopped Hitler in his tracks, even as late as February 1933. Equally, for us, there’s plenty that we can do to resist, even if it might feel like we’re individually powerless.
For one thing, we can revitalize our own relationships with democracy. We can join neighborhood organizations and get to know people on our block who have experiences and opinions that differ from our own. We can show solidarity with local members of the minority groups that MAGA has in its sights.
We can support our public libraries and flex our literacy muscles. Literacy is the foundation stone of critical thinking. As America’s literacy rates decline, our ability to tell disinformation from truth declines — which makes it easier for us to fall into the MAGA universe. And MAGA thrives on social media attention, whether good or bad. Even engagement that tries to condemn them only ends up amplifying them. It’s more effective to put the phone down, get out into the community, and commit to creating positive changes where we live.
If enough of us embrace simple measures like these, we may yet avert the dire threat that Donald Trump and his movement pose to American life.
Berryman is founder & CEO of The Ninth Candle, a nonprofit working with schools across the U.S. to improve Holocaust education. His book, “Resisting Nazism,” is forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield.
