They thought Hitler was a joke. Then they gave him the country.
When Adolf Hitler first appeared on the scene, few took him seriously. To Germany’s elite, he was a joke. He was a loudmouth with a funny mustache, a failed artist ranting in beer halls. His ideas were extreme, his gestures exaggerated, his speeches were easy to mock. Many dismissed him as a political joke. He was a nobody shouting nonsense in beer halls to angry men with too much time on their hands.
But behind the spectacle was something more dangerous. His message resonated with men who felt forgotten and ignored. He resonated with people who felt like Germany had become a loser.
Germany was hurting. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles had humiliated the country. It had stripped it of land and saddled it with crushing debt. It was forced to accept sole blame for the war.
The economy collapsed. Hyperinflation made money worthless. Unemployment soared. For many Germans, the republic that replaced the monarchy felt weak and chaotic.
And in stepped a man who said he could fix it all.
Hitler didn’t rise through competence. He rose through resentment. He tried and failed to seize power outright in 1923 during the Beer Hall Putsch. It was a botched coup that landed him in prison. Even then, people mocked him. He used the trial as a platform. He used prison to write Mein Kampf – a horrid book. And over the next decade, he used words to rebuild his movement. The bullets would come later.
By the early 1930s, elites in German business and government thought they could use him. He had popular support. Maybe they could harness it. They believed they could control him, contain him, keep him on a leash. He’d serve their ends, and they’d clip his wings if he got too loud.
They were wrong.Hitler didn’t need to take power by force. He was elected chancellor in 1933. Within months, he turned that office into a dictatorship. He was no longer the punchline. He was the Führer. And the people who had laughed found themselves silenced – or “disappeared.”
Authoritarianism doesn’t always announce itself with a bang. Sometimes it arrives wearing a smirk. Sometimes it looks ridiculous, unserious, unqualified. And that’s part of the danger. We underestimate it. We laugh at it. We assume that the systems will hold. We assume the adults will step in, and the joke will burn itself out.
Until it doesn’t.
Guardrails matter. They’re there for a reason. They shouldn’t be brushed aside with jokes like, “You’re being too dramatic” or “Lighten up.” The tragedy of Hitler’s rise wasn’t just in what he did. It was in how many people saw it coming and laughed.
Arresting the “Criminals”
Once Hitler had power, he needed a target. Authoritarians often do. To unite a country through fear, you must first give it an enemy. And so, Hitler didn’t waste time blaming Germany’s collapse on a long list of “others.” Jews. Socialists. Communists. Homosexuals. The disabled. The “degenerates.” Anyone who didn’t conform to his vision of a pure and obedient German state became a threat to be neutralized. The goal wasn’t just to silence dissent. It was to cleanse the country.
And he probably was a true believer, which almost makes it worse.
The strategy was simple. Criminalize your enemies, then claim to be restoring order by removing them. Hitler’s followers didn’t just tolerate the arrests, beatings, and disappearances. They cheered them. Because these weren’t innocent people to them. They were “traitors,” “parasites,” “criminals.” Or so they were told.
Historians still debate the details, but many believe that Hitler either had the Reichstag – the German Parliament building – set on fire or at least exploited the fire in 1933 to consolidate his power. The blaze gave him the perfect excuse to invoke emergency powers, suspend civil liberties, and sideline Parliament.
With the legislature neutralized, there was no serious check left to oppose him. Predictably, Hitler blamed the fire on the Communists, who were his most powerful political rivals at the time. The move gave him an excuse to arrest thousands, dismantle their party, and eliminate meaningful opposition. It’s a strategy as old as human history.
Enter Brownshirts. They were Hitler’s private militia of street thugs and vigilantes. They weren’t police. They weren’t military. But they were loyal. They broke up opposition rallies, beat journalists, harassed minorities, and intimidated voters. All while the government looked the other way – or applauded.
If someone wanted to take over a country, this is a clever way. You by-pass ordinary groups like the police or the military. You don’t have complete control over them. Instead, you find a way to fund and raise an “army” of highly motivated loyalists who don’t mind breaking the rules. You work around the system with this group that will follow your every command.
Propaganda did the rest. The Nazi press wasn’t just biased. It was fully integrated into the state. Newspapers, films, and radio all carried the same message: Germany is under threat, and only Hitler can save it. “The people” were under siege. And anyone who questioned that version of the story wasn’t just disagreeing. They were dangerous and needed to be eliminated.
The first concentration camps weren’t built for Jews. They were built for political enemies. They were built for those who refused to toe the Nazi line. The goal was clear. Make resistance painful, and make silence feel safe.
This is how authoritarianism works. It doesn’t begin with mass graves. It begins with lists. Labels. Slogans. Enemies. It begins when people are told to fear each other. When the government defines who belongs and who doesn’t.
When a leader tells you who to fear and promises that only they can protect you, keep this in mind. Fear is a tool, not a solution. Ask yourself, “Who is really the threat?”
America First
When fascism rose across Europe in the 1930s, much of the world watched and hesitated. Germany wasn’t the only place drifting toward dictatorship. Italy had already embraced Benito Mussolini, whose iron-fisted rhetoric inspired Hitler himself. Japan, fueled by imperial ambition, was expanding aggressively across Asia, leaving brutality and conquest in its wake.
It wasn’t just Germany. It was a moment in time. It was a movement that was sweeping across continents. Strongmen were rising. Democracies were retreating. And fear was turning into strategy.
Faced with this growing danger, America’s response was clear. Stay out of it. After the trauma of World War I, the U.S. leaned hard into isolation. Many Americans believed Europe’s problems were Europe’s to solve. That impulse took political form in the “America First” movement.
The America First Committee argued that war was a foreign entanglement we couldn’t afford. The real threat to America, they claimed, wasn’t fascism. It was intervention. Among its members were prominent business leaders, celebrities, and even a young Charles Lindbergh – the first person to fly across the Atlantic. “America First” became a rallying cry for those who wanted to shield the country from global conflict. Even if it meant ignoring the rise of tyranny abroad.
But for some, the hesitation wasn’t just about neutrality. It was hiding sympathy. Nazi ideas about race and power found receptive ears in parts of the U.S. In 1939, just months before Germany invaded Poland, a pro-Nazi rally drew 20,000 people to Madison Square Garden in New York City. They raised their hands in salute beneath a giant portrait of George Washington, flanked by swastikas.
American fascism wasn’t theoretical. It was on full display. We like to look back at World War II and congratulate ourselves for our virtue. But the Germans of the 1930s weren’t uniquely evil. They were human – just like us. Under the right conditions, any society can be deceived, manipulated, and swept into horror. Some will cheer it on. Some will realize it too late to do anything about it.
Even as Germany began its violent march across Europe, many Americans insisted it wasn’t our fight. Even as reports of brutality mounted, even as Jews fled and warnings grew louder, leaders chose political caution over moral clarity. In one of the most heartbreaking episodes, a ship filled with Jewish refugees – including children – arrived in New York Harbor in 1939. We turned it away. Most of those passengers would later die in the camps of the Holocaust.
By the time Pearl Harbor forced America’s hand in 1941, much of the world had already descended into darkness.
Looking in the Mirror
They say war changes a nation. World War II didn’t just shake the world. It fundamentally changed America.
The American war effort was nothing short of staggering. Factories roared back to life, turning out tanks instead of toasters, bombers instead of Buicks. Women flooded into the workforce. “Rosie the Riveter” became a national icon. African Americans joined the effort too, despite facing brutal discrimination both in and out of uniform. They worked in segregated units. They were denied basic rights at home. Yet they still showed up to defend a country that didn’t yet fully defend them.
This was the “arsenal of democracy.”
However, while we fought Nazi racism overseas, we quietly practiced our own version at home. In 1942, the U.S. government forcibly relocated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans into internment camps, two-thirds of which were citizens. They were never charged with crimes. There was no probable cause. They were never given trials or a chance to defend themselves.
Their homes, businesses, and dignity were stripped away, not because of evidence but because of fear. We told ourselves it was for national security. But the truth is, it was easier to scapegoat than to defend the rights of those who looked like the enemy. We sinned against the United States of America and its Constitution.
Meanwhile, American soldiers pushed through the heart of Europe. And when they reached the Nazi concentration camps, they saw what unchecked hatred becomes. They smelled it. They walked through the bones. The Holocaust wasn’t a rumor anymore. It wasn’t enemy propaganda. It was ovens, mass graves, and gas chambers. It was the industrialization of genocide.
The U.S. military didn’t just liberate the camps. In places like Dachau, they forced German citizens to walk through them. These were neighbors, bystanders, patriots. They claimed they didn’t know. But ignorance was no longer an option. You can’t unsee what you’ve seen.
They had believed the lies. They had swallowed the propaganda. They had laughed at the alarmists – until those alarmists quietly disappeared. The truth they denied now lay at their feet, silent and undeniable.
Truth was the first step toward justice.
But justice didn’t just mean winning battles. It meant facing uncomfortable truths. It meant asking how a civilized society could become so complicit in evil. And it meant asking what kinds of injustice we had tolerated in our own country while pretending to be the world’s moral compass.
Philosopher Hannah Arendt studied the men who led the Nazi movement. What struck her more than anything was how ordinary they were. They were not geniuses. They were not brilliant strategists. They were just people. Pencil-pushers. Bureaucrats doing what they were told. To sum it up, she called it the “banality of evil.”
We fought fascism abroad while excusing it in a corner at home. We liberated camps in Europe while building them in California. You can’t claim to stand for human dignity if that dignity only applies to some.
It is the height of naivety to think that similar atrocities couldn’t happen here. Human nature hasn’t changed. Our capacity to be deceived and manipulated hasn’t changed. If anything, the newness of social media, AI, and the sophistication of propaganda have made us more vulnerable to misinformation than ever before.
Like the townspeople of Dachau, some of us would not believe it unless we saw the rotting bodies with our own eyes. And even then, some would come up with an alternative explanation.
The Weight of Victory
There was certainly a fair share of celebration after World War II ended. But there was much to mourn too.
Seventy million people were dead. Cities were ash. Borders were redrawn. Empires collapsed. Humanity had seen the depths of its own depravity and barely survived it. But amid the rubble, one nation stood tall. The United States hadn’t just won. It had emerged as a superpower: economically dominant, militarily unmatched, culturally influential.
The question was what kind of superpower we would be.
That’s the real test of power. Not how you fight, but how you lead. Not whether you can conquer evil, but whether you can resist becoming it. In the years that followed, America helped rebuild what it had helped destroy. The Marshall Plan invested billions in Europe’s recovery. The United Nations took shape. NATO was born. The idea, however imperfectly executed, was that America would use its power not just for self-interest, but for peace. Not just for dominance, but for dignity.
That tension has never gone away.
Power always tempts us to forget why we fought in the first place. It makes it easy to trade ideals for advantage, to silence critics in the name of security, to put flags over principles. It makes it easy to think that because we won, we’re always right. That we’re always the good guys. That the ends always justify the means.
That’s the danger of victory. It whispers, “You’ve earned this.” And we stop asking whether what we’re doing is still just, or simply convenient. Or maybe selfish.
