Pip: A literary scholar sits down to explain Hitler — not as a politician, not as a class actor, but as a cultural phenomenon. What could possibly go wrong with that framing?
Mara: That's the question freerein61 is working through in a long-form critical essay on J. P. Stern's 1975 book, and the stakes turn out to be larger than one scholar's methodology.
Pip: Let's start with what Stern actually argued, and why it mattered so far beyond his own intentions.
J. P. Stern and the "Ordinary Germans" Thesis
Mara: The central tension here is interpretive: did fascism rise because of who the German people were — their culture, their psychology, their collective will — or because of what the German ruling class did when capitalism stopped working for them?
Pip: Stern comes down firmly, if implicitly, on the first side. The post describes his core inquiry as how "someone of apparent intellectual and moral mediocrity could garner the loyalty of millions in a modern industrial society" — a puzzle he frames in terms of mentality, myth, and collective imagery.
Mara: And that framing has real consequences. By centering the Führer-Volk bond as the primary explanatory factor, Stern's approach shifts attention away from the structural crisis of German capitalism, the political paralysis of the workers' movement, and the ruling class's strategic choices.
Pip: To be fair to Stern, he was no apologist. He fled Nazi occupation, flew with the RAF's Czechoslovak squadron, and spent his career studying German literature with evident moral seriousness. The essay is careful to say the book has genuine strengths — a nuanced reading of Hitler's rhetoric, a sharp eye for the Third Reich's symbolic economy.
Mara: Right, and the essay acknowledges that Stern correctly dismissed the postwar myth of a small criminal gang hypnotizing an innocent nation. He recognized that fascism engaged real social segments and built on authentic ideological traditions.
Pip: Which is exactly what makes the methodological problem interesting — this is a rigorous, earnest book that nonetheless treats "the people" as a single undifferentiated psychological entity, when Weimar Germany was, as the essay puts it, "far from culturally unified."
Mara: The electoral numbers make that concrete. At the peak of Nazi support in the July 1932 Reichstag election, the NSDAP received 37.3 percent of the vote. By November 1932 that had fallen to 33.1 percent, with the party losing two million votes and facing what the essay describes as a crisis severe enough that some leaders feared collapse.
Pip: So "the people" were, at best, a third of the people — and a declining third at that.
Mara: The essay sets this against Trotsky's contemporaneous analysis, which identified fascism's social base not as a unified nation but as the devastated petty bourgeoisie: small shopkeepers, indebted peasants, artisans displaced by industrialization, white-collar workers facing proletarianization. Trotsky described fascism as raising the "human dust" of society — mobilizing those fragments as a weapon against the organized working class, in the strategic interest of large capital.
Mara: Hitler's chancellorship on January 30, 1933 wasn't a democratic outcome. It was a backroom arrangement between Hindenburg, Papen, and conservative nationalists who calculated that Hitler could crush the labor movement and restore capitalist order.
Pip: Stern's framework, the essay argues, can't really account for any of that — because once you dissolve class into a collective national psychology, the ruling class becomes a background presence rather than the force that actually opened the door.
Mara: The essay traces how that interpretive move propagated forward. Ian Kershaw's work on the Hitler myth deepened the focus on the Führer image as a unifying symbol. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners pushed it to an extreme, attributing the Holocaust to an alleged eliminationist antisemitism shared by nearly all Germans. Gellately's Backing Hitler emphasized popular consent as central to the regime's consolidation. Götz Aly's Hitler's Beneficiaries recast the Third Reich as a plunder-funded welfare state, dispersing responsibility across society as a whole.
Pip: Each step further from class, further from structure, further from the question of who mobilized whom and in whose interest.
Mara: The essay's closing argument is that this matters now. Far-right parties across Europe and the United States are drawing support from petty-bourgeois layers devastated by economic instability, from workers disoriented by decades of neoliberal policy, and from ruling-class factions open to authoritarian options. The essay argues that a cultural-psychological account of fascism — one that treats it as a pathology of a particular national character — makes the threat appear safely contained in history, when the structural conditions that produced it are still present.
Pip: Stern's literary analysis of Nazi rhetoric remains valuable, the essay grants that. But as a guide to how Hitler actually came to power, it points in the wrong direction — and a lot of subsequent scholarship followed.
Mara: The essay puts it plainly: fascism was not a reflection of a national spirit but the result of a political crisis rooted in capitalism, and the conditions that gave rise to it have not disappeared.
Pip: So the argument is that how you explain the past shapes what you can see coming.
Mara: If fascism is a cultural anomaly, it belongs to someone else's history. If it's a structural response to capitalist crisis and political failure, it's everyone's problem right now.
Pip: That seems like a distinction worth sitting with until next time.
When J. P. Stern released Hitler: The Führer and the People in 1975, it appeared to fit a well-known genre: a literary scholar’s exploration of political disaster. Stern, a respected Germanist, examined Hitler not as a political leader or tactician but as a cultural figure, whose influence seemed to challenge standard political explanations. His main inquiry- how someone of apparent intellectual and moral mediocrity could garner the loyalty of millions in a modern industrial society- was seen as a puzzle involving mentality, myth, and collective imagery. Initially, the book seemed a compassionate, liberal effort to understand the psychological and symbolic factors through which Hitler built a connection with “the people.”
Half a century on, Stern’s work appears differently. It represents an early, formative example of an interpretive shift that has come to dominate Western scholarship on National Socialism since the late 1970s: the idea that the Nazi regime was based on a genuine, largely voluntary relationship between leader and people, and that understanding fascism’s catastrophe depends mainly on the attitudes, desires, and ideological beliefs of ordinary Germans. In this view, the key factor was not the structural crisis of German capitalism, the political paralysis of the workers’ movement, or the ruling class’s strategic choices, but rather the German people’s cultural and psychological inclination to accept Hitler’s message. Stern did not originate this viewpoint, but he helped articulate its early coherence and credibility.
This significantly enhances the importance of his book. Stern did not defend fascism. Born in Prague in 1920, he escaped the Nazi occupation, served in the RAF’s Czechoslovak squadron, and dedicated his academic career to studying German literature, culture, and political ideas. He demonstrated his anti-fascism through his actions, not just his words. The book, Hitler: The Führer and the People, has notable strengths: a nuanced analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric, an insightful exploration of the Third Reich’s symbolic economy, and an avoidance of reducing the dictator’s appeal to coercion or mass hypnosis alone. Because the book is intellectually rigorous and morally earnest, its methodological choices and their implications warrant careful examination.
For Stern, understanding Nazism involved analysing how modern mass politics combined with ancient ideas of community, destiny, and leadership. He believed Hitler’s rise stemmed from his skill in creating a mythic connection with “the people,” a relationship that transcended class boundaries and offered hope through unity. This focus on mentality and myth foreshadowed later studies that described the Third Reich as a “consensus dictatorship,” a regime held together not just by fear but by widespread identification with its ideals. In Stern’s view, the relationship between the Führer and the Volk became the key to explaining the regime.
However, this interpretive approach had drawbacks. By emphasising the cultural and psychological factors behind Hitler’s appeal, Stern inadvertently minimised the structural forces enabling fascism: the economic crisis of German capitalism, the political confusion among the petty bourgeoisie, the strategic interests of industrial and financial elites, and the failures of workers’ parties. By focusing on “the people,” the book shifted away from class analysis and framed a political and economic crisis as a cultural narrative. This introduction prepares for a critical review of Stern’s argument not to undermine his scholarship, but to explore how a compassionate, anti-fascist thinker contributed to a paradigm that ultimately limited the scope of explanation.
The “politics of the will”
Stern argues that Hitler isn’t just a demagogue or a puppet of conservative elites. Instead, he contends that Hitler expressed existing German desires: a leader who embodies the nation’s will; authentic politics based on sacrifice, struggle, and emotion; and relief from parliamentary frustrations. According to Stern, Hitler’s appeal was not fabricated, but recognised; he succeeded because he echoed sentiments already widespread among Germans.
To support this, Stern analyses Hitler’s speeches, Mein Kampf, and his table talk through a literary critic’s lens. He identifies recurring themes such as will, destiny, struggle, and the idea of the lonely leader misunderstood by lesser minds, tracing them back to elements in German cultural history like Romantic irrationalism, the cult of Erlebnis (lived experience), and simplified aspects of Nietzschean philosophy. Stern argues that Hitler’s rhetoric resonated because it reflected familiar cultural patterns. The relationship between the Führer and the Volk was therefore mutual. Hitler did not merely impose his will on the nation; he embodied what a significant part of the German people desired.
As literary analysis, much of this is insightful. Stern astutely highlights the hollowness of Nazi ideology, noting its dependence on symbols rather than rational argument, its replacement of truth with perceived sincerity, and its theatrical use of emotion. He correctly dismisses the postwar myth that a small group of criminals hypnotised an otherwise innocent nation. Instead, he recognises that fascism engaged genuine social segments and built on authentic ideological traditions. His keen attention to language, symbolism, and cultural meaning lets him illuminate aspects of Hitler’s allure that conventional political histories often miss.
However, Stern never seriously addresses the crucial question: who mobilised whom, and in favour of which class? By viewing “the people” as a single cultural entity, Stern overlooks the social conflicts that enabled fascism to emerge. His perspective assumes a uniform national community sharing common aspirations. Yet, early 1930s German society was far from culturally unified; it was deeply divided by class and undergoing severe economic and political turmoil. The Depression devastated millions, radicalised many in the petty bourgeoisie, and led the ruling class to doubt that parliamentary democracy could protect its interests. Meanwhile, the organised working class, through the SPD and KPD, represented a formidable political force whose potential for unified action alarmed industrial and financial elites.
Stern’s framework cannot account for these dynamics. By focusing on cultural motifs and psychological dispositions, he treats the Führer–Volk bond as the primary explanatory factor rather than as an ideological expression of deeper social processes. The longing for unity, sacrifice, and “authentic” politics did not arise spontaneously from the German soul; it emerged from the disintegration of the petty bourgeoisie, the desperation of ruined shopkeepers and clerks, and the fears of agrarian and industrial elites confronting a militant working class. Hitler’s rhetoric resonated because it offered these groups an escape from crisis, not through cultural catharsis, but through destroying the labour movement and reasserting capitalist order.
Furthermore, Stern’s emphasis on reciprocity between leaders and the populace masks the ruling class’s crucial role in bringing Hitler to power. The Nazis didn’t take control of the state through cultural appeal; instead, they were positioned there by conservative elites who believed Hitler could crush the workers’ movement and secure capitalism. Events like the Preußenschlag, the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres of Papen and Schleicher, and the financial support from Thyssen and Kirdorf are not minor details but key elements of fascist rise. Stern’s cultural perspective makes them seem secondary or accidental because he focuses his explanation elsewhere.
The narrative portrays the German people as the main agents of their own disaster. At the same time, the broader issues of capitalism’s systemic crisis and the ruling class’s strategic choices become less prominent. This voluntarist view would later evolve into the “consensus dictatorship” model, which emphasises popular support as central to Nazi rule. Stern’s book differs slightly from that later scholarship but foreshadows its key shift: replacing class analysis with a focus on mentality, culture, and collective desire.
Acknowledging Stern’s literary expertise does not imply agreement with his historical judgments. Hitler’s rhetoric was significant, but primarily because it expressed and helped shape the interests of particular social groups within a crisis-driven capitalist society. The Führer–Volk connection was not an unexplained cultural phenomenon; it was a political alliance forged through class conflict, economic failure, and deliberate ruling-class action. Any analysis that views “the people” as a single unified cultural entity inevitably overlooks the forces that enabled fascism to emerge.
“The people” as an abstraction
Stern’s book is fundamentally limited by its title. The phrase “the people” appears throughout as a single, undifferentiated entity with a common psychology, will, and susceptibility to Hitler’s rhetoric. In reality, the German nation during the Weimar period was far from this idealised notion. It was a society fractured by class conflicts, political divisions, and economic turmoil. Referring to “the people” as a unified whole overlooks the complex social realities that facilitated the rise of fascism.
Germany’s working class was the largest, most politically aware, and best-organised in Europe. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD) consistently outperformed the Nazis in elections. Even at Nazi support’s peak, the working class stood as the main obstacle to fascism. The electoral results alone challenge the idea of a nation rallying behind its Führer. In the July 1932 Reichstag election, which marked Nazi support’s height in a free vote, the NSDAP received 37.3 per cent of the vote. This was a plurality, not a majority, suggesting desperation among the petty bourgeoisie rather than broad popular support. By November 1932, Nazi support declined to 33.1 per cent, losing two million votes, and the party faced a crisis severe enough that some leaders feared it might collapse.
Popular enthusiasm did not fuel Hitler’s rise to power. Instead, the German ruling class, facing economic collapse and fearing the working class, adopted fascism as a tool for political control. On 30 January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg, Franz von Papen, and conservative nationalists made a behind-the-scenes deal that installed Hitler as chancellor. This was not a democratic choice but a strategic move by elites seeking to dismantle the labour movement and restore capitalist dominance. Key support came from heavy industry, the Junker aristocracy, and the military leadership. Even the March 1933 elections, held amid intimidation, with Communist deputies detained, leftist press banned, and SA violence widespread, failed to give the Nazis an outright majority.
This is well known and appears in every comprehensive history of the era. However, in a book focused on the connection between the Führer and the people, this point becomes less prominent, emphasising cultural and psychological factors over economic and class explanations. This creates an idealist perspective in which ideas, myths, and shared aspirations drive history, separate from the material conflicts that fuelled them.
This idealism isn’t coincidental. It stems directly from Stern’s choice to view “the people” as a cultural unity rather than a class-divided society. When the working class, petty bourgeoisie, and ruling class merge into a single psychological entity, Weimar Germany’s political crisis shifts from social structures to mentalities. The desire for unity, sacrifice, and “authentic” politics then emerges as a national mood, not merely an ideological stance rooted in specific class interests. Consequently, Hitler’s appeal transcends politics and becomes a cultural phenomenon rather than a tactic aimed at dismantling the labour movement.
Stern’s literary sensitivity traces themes like will, destiny, and struggle back to Romantic irrationalism and a simplified Nietzsche, yet paradoxically distorts them. By emphasising the symbolic role of Nazi rhetoric, he regards the Führer–Volk relationship as the main explanation. However, rhetoric is always connected to social relations. Hitler’s speech resonated because it expressed the fears and hopes of specific social groups: the devastated petty bourgeoisie, farming elites, and industrial magnates, who saw fascism as a means to restore profits and suppress the working class. The Nazis did not rally “the people” universally; instead, they mobilised particular classes with aligned interests in destroying the workers’ movement.
Stern’s framework falls short here. His concept of “people” is too abstract, overly unified, and psychologically cohesive to capture the real divisions in German society. A cultural haze obscures the working class, which has millions of members, is politically organised, and can often take decisive action. Meanwhile, the ruling class appears as a background presence rather than the influential force that helped bring Hitler to power. The petty bourgeoisie, which played a key role in the social radicalisation fuelling fascism, is blended into a generalised national desire for unity and sacrifice.
The outcome is a narrative where ideas drive history. Hitler succeeds because he articulates the nation’s will; the people follow out of a desire for authenticity; the disaster occurs because collective psychology makes it possible—material factors such as economic collapse, class struggle, and political paralysis become less important. Fascism transforms into a cultural drama rather than a political fix for capitalism’s crisis. Highlighting this weakness does not dismiss Stern’s literary insights but emphasises that cultural analysis alone cannot replace social explanation. The bond between the Führer and the Volk was not a psychological mystery but a political relationship formed through class conflict and elite strategies. Any explanation that views “the people” as a unified entity tends to hide the underlying forces that enabled fascism.
What the Marxists understood
Trotsky’s critique of fascism provides not just an alternative to Stern’s approach but a fundamentally different perspective on what needs explaining. While Stern focuses on “the mentality of the people,” Trotsky approaches it from the societal structures, specifically, the conflicting classes that drove the Weimar crisis. He documented his analysis not years later with hindsight but during the rise of National Socialism. This contemporaneous perspective gives his account a clarity and immediacy that later cultural-psychological views often miss.
Trotsky described fascism as a mass movement originating from the petty bourgeoisie: small shopkeepers driven out by competition, peasants burdened by debt, artisans replaced by industrialisation, white-collar workers facing proletarianization, and former officers unable to reintegrate into civilian life. Shattered by war, inflation, and depression, these groups became desperate. Their anger stemmed from social realities, not abstract ideas. The capitalist system they upheld was undermining them. Fascism presented a false solution, redirecting their anger downward, against the organised working class, instead of addressing their core issues.
Large-scale capital investment funded and ultimately directed this movement as a powerful tool. Trotsky famously described fascism as raising the “human dust” of society, illustrating its social makeup and historical role: to fragment the proletariat, destroy trade unions and parties, and establish the dominance of finance capital when parliamentary systems no longer managed the class conflict. Fascism was not driven by national patriotism; rather, it served as the ruling class’s political instrument during an unresolved crisis.
This analysis does not deny Hitler’s widespread support; it explains its origins. Stern highlights the “politics of the will”, including the desire for a charismatic leader, the cult of sacrifice, and anger at parliamentary paralysis, reflecting the mindset of a fearful middle class trapped by the existing system. These feelings did not represent ‘the people’ as a whole but were the ideological expression of a particular class in crisis. Their desperation made them vulnerable to the appeals of unity, authority, and national rebirth.
Trotsky argued that the key issue was whether the working class could provide a revolutionary alternative to the middle class. It failed to do so. The SPD held on to the bourgeois state until it was ultimately destroyed by it. While advocating for the Weimar constitution, its leaders overlooked the threat posed by presidential decrees, emergency powers, and the increasing influence of the military and big businesses, which weakened it. Meanwhile, the KPD, adhering to Stalin’s disastrous “Third Period” policy, called the SPD “social fascists,” refused Trotsky’s call for a united front, and regarded the Nazis as just another form of bourgeois reaction. This created political paralysis. Although the working class was large and organised, it was divided at the crucial moment.
Hitler didn’t conquer the working class. He didn’t have to. The working class was disarmed, betrayed, and suppressed. Without a revolutionary alternative, the petty bourgeoisie supported fascism. The ruling class, looking for a way out of crisis, put Hitler in power. This disaster wasn’t due to national psychology; it resulted from a political failure rooted in class conflict.
Stern does not consider this a key element in his explanation. Its omission is deliberate. Without class dynamics, the only remaining factor is “the people,” and the disaster must be attributed to internal qualities like culture, traditions, or collective spirit. The desire for unity becomes a national characteristic; the craving for authority becomes a cultural legacy; and the failure of democracy is seen as a psychological issue rather than a political failure.
Stern’s book centres on this idealism. He simplifies society as an undivided “people,” turning fascism into primarily a cultural issue rather than a class conflict. This approach erases the working class, diminishes the ruling class, and merges the petty bourgeoisie into a unified national sentiment. In contrast, Trotsky’s analysis reintroduces the real factors that Stern overlooks: the material struggles, political conflicts, and class interests that enabled fascism to emerge.
A precursor
Today, Stern’s book is seen not as an isolated work but as the beginning of a wider historiographical movement. The questions he raised concerning Hitler’s charm, the symbolic link between leader and populace, and the cultural and psychological roots of dictatorship gradually became core themes in scholarship from the late 1970s onward. What was once tentative in Stern became normative: the idea that Nazism should mainly be understood through the mindset of ordinary Germans, with the Führer image serving as the key unifying force of the regime.
Ian Kershaw’s ‘The “Hitler Myth”‘ (1987) deepened this topic with more empirical evidence. He examined how Hitler’s public image served as a central unifying symbol within the regime, binding various social groups. While he considered repression, coercion, and social differences, he did not view the dictatorship as only driven by popular support. Instead, the focus shifted to the Führer image- its portrayal, how people received it, and its emotional impact- as the key explanation. Germany’s social makeup, class interests that influenced the regime, and the ruling elites’ political tactics still played a role, but as background influences rather than primary forces.
The trend advanced further when Daniel Goldhagen’s ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’ (1996) took the explanation to its extreme, linking the Holocaust to an alleged widespread “eliminationist antisemitism” among nearly all Germans. This offered a national cultural rationale for genocide, criticised by reputable historians but popular in the media, that reduced class, political, and state factors into a singular, undifferentiated collective mindset. Although Goldhagen’s claim was simplistic, it thrived within a framework Stern established: the idea that Nazism represented the will of “the people,” and that explaining the catastrophe required focusing on culture rather than class or power struggles.
Robert Gellately’s 2001 book, Backing Hitler, emphasised the role of popular consent in consolidating power. By focusing on the regime’s dependence on denunciations, voluntary cooperation, and daily involvement of ordinary people, Gellately suggested that terror played a less dominant role than once thought. The clear message was that the dictatorship thrived on widespread social support. In this view, the roles of the Gestapo, SS, and the industrial and military elites are minimised, while the actions of ‘ordinary Germans’ take centre stage.
Götz Aly’s *Hitler’s Beneficiaries* (2005) introduces a new perspective by depicting the Third Reich as a racist welfare state that secured loyalty through redistribution funded by plunder and conquest. The emphasis shifts from the ruling elite to society as a whole. Corporations that gained from rearmament and forced labour, industrialists who financed the Nazi Party, and military leaders and officials who enabled the regime tend to blend into the broader population. Responsibility becomes dispersed throughout “society,” as if the dictatorship was simply an expression of a unified national community.
Stern was more nuanced than Goldhagen, more cautious than Gellately, and considerably less reductive than Aly. He avoided proposing a simplistic theory of national guilt or asserting that all Germans shared a murderous ideology. However, he played a key role in shaping the conceptual landscape where such theories could develop. By viewing “the people” as a collective psychological entity, emphasising cultural symbols and collective aspirations, and downplaying class dynamics, Stern helped shift historiography. This shift made Nazism increasingly seem like an expression of the German people’s collective will.
The result was a compelling yet idealistic framework: a history shaped more by culture and mindset than by the material conflicts that underpinned those cultural forms. Stern’s book thus signals the start of a lengthy intellectual journey, one that gradually shifted focus from class, crisis, and political strategy to an understanding of fascism centred on the perceived unity of “the people.”
Why it matters and Why They Are Back
This historiographical shift matters beyond academia. If fascism is seen as a result of a specific national psychology, a cultural trait linked to “the Germans”, it appears as a contained phenomenon, a pathology of a particular group at a specific time. This allows moral judgment, mourning, and dismissal as a historical anomaly. However, if fascism is understood, as Trotsky argued, as the political reaction of a ruling class facing a crisis it can no longer resolve through parliamentary means. The threat is not limited to one country or period. Instead, it is a structural risk that appears whenever capitalism faces a breakdown, middle layers are pushed into despair, and the working class becomes politically immobilised. Therefore, the stakes in interpreting fascism are not just historical but also contemporary.
This question remains critically important. Throughout Europe and the U.S., far-right parties garner widespread support. Their platforms differ, but their social base remains consistent: parts of the petty bourgeoisie devastated by economic instability, segments of workers confused by years of neoliberal policies, and some members of the ruling elite open to authoritarian measures. Mainstream left parties, now disconnected from socialist ideals, enforce austerity, promote nationalism, and push anti-immigrant policies. A revitalised workers’ movement has not filled the political gap created by their rightward shift; instead, it has been occupied by groups that redirect social anger into xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and resentment.
In these conditions, the lessons from the 1930s remain relevant. They involve the ruling class, which, during crises, tries to maintain its power by any means. They also address the social breakdown of the middle classes, whose desperation can lead to either reactionary or revolutionary movements. Most importantly, they highlight the effects of the working class’s political inaction. When labour organisations support the current system, defend discredited institutions, or refuse to oppose threats, they allow forces promising radical solutions from the right to gain ground. Fascism doesn’t succeed because “the people” fall into collective madness, but because the only organised opposition fails to act.
These lessons are more applicable today than any theory of national character. The idea that fascism originates from cultural predispositions such as traditions, collective mentalities, or ingrained national traits provides comfort because it shifts the issue away from politics. It suggests that fascism is something others are susceptible to, not a risk that can develop wherever social crises and political failures intersect. This view turns a structural threat into a moral story.
Stern’s book is still valuable for its literary analysis of the language, symbolism, and self-presentation of Nazism. His keen awareness of rhetoric and myth illuminates Hitler’s appeal beyond what statistics can show. However, as a guide to how Hitler gained power and what his regime entailed, the book misdirects, and subsequent scholarship has followed this incorrect path. By depicting “the people” as a single psychological entity, emphasising cultural themes over class issues, and viewing the ruling class as part of a homogeneous society, this historiographical approach conceals the complex forces that enabled fascism.
Understanding fascism requires examining classes, parties, leadership, and the historical failures that enabled the rise of the twentieth century’s most perilous movement, rather than focusing solely on “the Führer and the people.” It is essential to recognise that fascism was not a reflection of a national spirit but a result of a political crisis rooted in capitalism. Furthermore, the conditions that gave rise to fascism still exist today. These persistent conditions require clear analysis, not soothing myths.
Bibliography
Primary Marxist and Trotskyist Sources
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1930–33).
Leon Trotsky, What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat (1932).
Leon Trotsky, The Only Road (1932).
Leon Trotsky, Bonapartism and Fascism (1934).
Daniel Guérin, Fascism and Big Business (1936).
August Thalheimer, On Fascism (1930).
Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (1970).
Current Historiography
J. P. Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People (1975).
Ian Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (1987).
Ian Kershaw, Hitler (2 vols., 1998–2000).
Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996).
Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (2001).
Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (2005).
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (1992) is important for contrast with Goldhagen.
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (2000).
Richard Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (2003); The Third Reich in Power (2005).
Class‑Analytical and Structural Histories
Tim Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class (1995).
David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic (1981).
Dick Geary, Hitler and Nazism (1993).
Pierre Broué, The German Revolution 1917–1923 (1971).
Eberhard Kolb, The Weimar Republic (1988).
Henry Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (1985).
Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction (2006), economic foundations of Nazi rule.
Contemporary Far‑Right and Crisis Studies
Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (2003).
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy (2002).
Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2014).
The publication of Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, a 1,352-page record of the writer’s six-month journey through Nazi Germany, has been met with widespread acclaim. Editors Mark Nixon and Oliver Lubrich present the diaries as Beckett’s “final major work,” revealing both his artistic development and his capacity as a historical observer. Yet reception has tended to elevate Beckett into a “prescient antifascist witness,” a figure whose moral clarity supposedly anticipates later understandings of fascism. This celebratory framing obscures the essential truth: Beckett’s diaries are testimony, not analysis. They record a sensibility recoiling from barbarism, but they do not grasp fascism as a class phenomenon. Beckett “draws no systematic connections between the museum purges he catalogued and the broader class dynamics of the Nazi seizure of power.”¹
This limitation is not Beckett’s personal failure. It is symptomatic of the broader liberal intelligentsia of the 1930s, which responded to fascism with moral outrage, aesthetic recoil, and political paralysis. Writers such as Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig described fascism’s cultural destruction but refused to confront the class struggle that made it possible. Testimony became a substitute for strategy; witness became a surrogate for analysis. To understand fascism’s rise in the 1930s and its re-emergence today, one must go beyond testimony. One must turn to Marxist analysis, above all Leon Trotsky’s writings from 1930–33, which remain the most penetrating examination of the German catastrophe. Beckett’s diaries are valuable precisely because they reveal the limits of liberal witness and the necessity of a materialist understanding of fascism.
Beckett travelled through Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich between September 1936 and April 1937. His diaries catalogue paintings, museum inventories, street names, and conversations. Yet beneath this catalogue lies what one reviewer called “a mounting, wordless dread.” He observed the removal of modernist and Expressionist works labelled “degenerate,” the disappearance of artworks into storage, and the disturbing conversations of ordinary Germans. He saw the cultural purge accompanying the consolidation of Nazi rule. He saw barbarism becoming normal. One passage from the diaries captures this aesthetic recoil: Beckett notes the “barbarism around him” and refuses to “turn away from these events,” even though he was not a political figure.² This honesty is admirable. But it is not political clarity.
Beckett’s observations align with the cultural destruction documented by historians of Nazi Germany. Richard J. Evans describes the Nazi cultural policy as “a systematic assault on modernism, intellectual freedom, and artistic experimentation,” designed to “reshape German consciousness in the image of the Volksgemeinschaft.”³ Ian Kershaw similarly emphasises that the cultural purge was integral to the regime’s consolidation of power, serving to “eliminate dissent, enforce conformity, and create a unified national community.”⁴ Beckett witnessed this process firsthand, but he did not analyse its social roots. His diaries record symptoms, not causes.
Beckett did not attempt to theorise fascism. He did not link the museum purges to the destruction of the German labour movement, the role of German heavy industry, or the betrayals of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Stalinised Communist Party (KPD). He did not connect cultural repression to class repression. Beckett “did not fully grasp fascism as a class-based phenomenon.”⁵ This is precisely the limitation of liberal testimony: it describes symptoms without analysing causes. Liberalism recoils from barbarism but cannot explain it. It sees fascism as a moral aberration rather than a bourgeois class strategy.
Thomas Mann, writing in exile, described fascism as “the triumph of barbarism over culture,” a “demonic eruption” of irrational forces.⁶ Stefan Zweig similarly portrayed fascism as a “collective madness,” a “plunge into darkness.”⁷ These formulations capture the emotional experience of fascism but obscure its material foundations. They elevate witness into politics and mistake personal sensibility for historical understanding. Beckett’s diaries belong to this tradition. They record the destruction of modernism, the atmosphere of dread, and the cultural purge accompanying Nazi consolidation. They reveal a sensibility recoiling from barbarism. But they do not explain why barbarism triumphed.
To understand fascism, one must turn to Marxist analysis. Leon Trotsky’s writings from 1930–33- The Only Road, What Next?, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany remain the most incisive examination of the German catastrophe. Trotsky argued that fascism was not a cultural phenomenon but a class strategy of the bourgeoisie, designed to crush the working class and preserve capitalist rule. Trotsky wrote in 1932: “Fascism is not a psychological phenomenon but a political one. Its roots lie not in the ‘madness’ of the petty bourgeoisie but in the crisis of capitalism.”⁸ He emphasised that the united front was the only means of stopping Hitler: “The proletariat can defeat fascism only through the united front. The refusal of the SPD and KPD leaderships to unite is the decisive factor in Hitler’s rise.”⁹
Trotsky demonstrated that the collapse of the united front was not inevitable but the result of political errors. The SPD defended bourgeois legality and sabotaged every independent struggle. The KPD, under Stalin’s direction, adopted the disastrous theory that the SPD was “social fascist,” the main enemy of the working class. Hermann Weber documents how this policy “paralysed the working class” and “prevented any united front against Hitler.”¹⁰ The most notorious example was the 1931 Prussian referendum, where the KPD collaborated with the Nazis to overthrow the SPD government, an act Trotsky described as “political insanity.”¹¹ Beckett could not see this. Liberal testimony rarely does.
Richard J. Evans emphasises that the SPD leadership “remained committed to parliamentary legality even as the Nazis prepared for civil war.”¹² Evans notes that the SPD “undermined every independent struggle” and “confused the working class” by insisting that the Weimar constitution could restrain Hitler. Ian Kershaw similarly argues that the SPD’s strategy amounted to “passive fatalism,” a refusal to mobilise the working class against fascism.¹³ Under Stalin’s direction, the KPD adopted the disastrous “social fascism” line, treating the SPD as the main enemy of the working class. Weber documents how this policy “paralysed the working class” and “prevented any united front against Hitler.”¹⁴ Trotsky wrote: “The working class has been disarmed by its own organisations. The question is not one of ‘self-deception’ but of betrayal.”¹⁵ Beckett’s diaries do not address these political dynamics. They record the cultural symptoms of fascism but not its class roots.
The reception of Beckett’s diaries today mirrors the liberal response to fascism in the 1930s. Contemporary reviewers describe rearmament and the far right as spontaneous trends, and they treat “historical amnesia” as a cultural mood rather than a political strategy. “The far right is not gaining power despite mainstream parties and media; rather, they actively support it.”¹⁶ The media and political establishment have systematically normalised the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The WSWS has documented how major German outlets have advocated rearmament for a decade, urging increased military spending and the restoration of Germany’s global influence.¹⁷ This is not amnesia. It is policy. Just as in the 1930s, liberal testimony recoils from barbarism but cannot name its social roots.
Beckett’s diaries teach us how dictatorship permeates everyday life, how cultural destruction accompanies political consolidation, and how individuals respond to barbarism aesthetically and emotionally. But they do not teach us how fascism arises, how fascism consolidates power, or how fascism can be stopped. A lack of witnesses did not cause the deaths of workers in concentration camps. Their own organisations betrayed them. Diaries cannot protect today’s working class. Its fate depends on politically rearming itself as an independent force against the SPD, the trade union bureaucracy, the pseudo-left, and the capitalist state preparing for war and authoritarianism. Testimony is valuable. But testimony without politics is evasion.
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries is an honest and perceptive work. It records the destruction of German modernism, the atmosphere of dread, and the cultural purge accompanying Nazi consolidation. It reveals a sensibility recoiling from barbarism. That is its achievement and its limit. Understanding fascism is not a task of memory. It is a task of Marxist analysis and political organisation. And it begins where Beckett’s testimony ends: with the class forces that produced fascism in the 1930s and are preparing new dangers today.
Endnotes
Samuel Beckett, German Diaries 1936–1937, ed. Mark Nixon and Oliver Lubrich (New York: Grove Press, 2026), quoted in the attached document.
Ibid.
Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin, 2003), 142–165.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris (London: Penguin, 1998), 256–290.
Beckett, German Diaries, quoted in the previous document.
Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades (New York: Knopf, 1947), 142–150.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (London: Pushkin Press, 2009), 280–310.
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), 75.
Leon Trotsky, What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat (1932), in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, 112–130.
Hermann Weber, The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism (London: Palgrave, 2010), 88–120.
Trotsky, The Only Road (1932), in The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, 45–60.
Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 210–230.
Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 300–315.
Weber, The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism, 121–150.
Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, 90.
Previous Draft.
Johannes Stern, “The Victory of Fascism and the Founding of the Fourth International,” WSWS Lecture Series (2023); International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), “The Promotion of the AfD by the German State,” WSWS (2017–2026).
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Beckett, Samuel. German Diaries 1936–1937. Edited by Mark Nixon and Oliver Lubrich. New York: Grove Press, 2026. Trotsky, Leon. The Only Road. 1932. In The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971. Trotsky, Leon. What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat. 1932. In The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971. Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971.
Secondary Sources
Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. London: Penguin, 2003. Fulbrook, Mary. A Small Town Near Auschwitz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: Hubris. London: Penguin, 1998. Mann, Thomas. Essays of Three Decades. New York: Knopf, 1947. North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left
In 2016, when Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf reappeared on Germany’s bestseller charts after the Bavarian state’s copyright expired, the German political scene responded with pride and complacency. The annotated edition by the Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) was celebrated as a democratic milestone, seen as an educational achievement that would help the public engage with the origins of National Socialism under expert guidance. The book’s commercial success was viewed not as a sign of political risk but as a sign of civic maturity—suggesting Germans were now prepared to read Hitler “critically.”
This narrative was false from the beginning and has become even more unsustainable over the years. The annotated edition of Mein Kampf does not signal enlightenment; it signals a deeper political crisis. Its popularity does not show the resilience of democratic culture but highlights the weakening of the postwar order and the reassertion of far-right ideas within Germany. The threat of fascism is not simply about reading material; it stems from social conditions, class dynamics, and capitalism’s economic struggles during crises.
This essay explores the return of Mein Kampf as an indicator of current political conditions, placing it in the context of the German ruling class’s historical failures. It contends that combating fascism cannot be limited to academic references or liberal education alone. Instead, it demands independent action by the working class, equipped with a Marxist analysis of fascism’s class origins and lessons from the disastrous defeat of 1933.
The Official Narrative: Enlightenment Without Politics
The German state’s portrayal of the IfZ edition was consistently uniform. Its critical apparatus—comprising nearly 2,000 pages, 3,500 footnotes, and detailed contextual commentary—was designed as a form of intellectual cleansing. By positioning scholarly corrections, historical clarifications, and condemnations of Hitler’s pseudo-scientific racism alongside his text, the edition was said to have “defanged” the book. It was claimed that readers would be protected from its ideological influence.
This narrative is built on two incorrect assumptions. First, it believes fascism mainly revolves around false ideas, and the real threat comes from those ideas spreading unchecked. If the public can be led to see Hitler’s mistakes, the danger is considered eliminated. This view reflects a liberal perspective, seeing fascism as a corrupt way of thinking rather than a result of social and political forces. Second, it presumes that Germany’s postwar government has already addressed the fundamental political and historical issues related to Nazism. The annotated edition is portrayed as the culmination of Germany’s democratic development—implying that, after confronting its past, Germany can now publish Hitler’s writings without fear of ideological influence. Both assumptions collapse under scrutiny.
The threat of fascism doesn’t stem from Mein Kampf itself but from the conditions that cause it to resonate: economic crises, political instability, the collapse of bourgeois democracy, and the ruling class’s willingness to adopt authoritarian measures. No amount of footnotes can replace an analysis of these underlying factors. Additionally, the postwar German state failed to address Nazism’s legacy fully; it merely suppressed it. De-Nazification was quickly abandoned due to Cold War pressures, as Nazi jurists, bureaucrats, and police officials were reabsorbed into the state.
The Federal Republic sought to suppress this history with legal bans rather than open political debate. Banning Mein Kampf represented political evasion rather than democratic resilience. Consequently, the annotated edition functions more as historical preservation than enlightenment: it makes the text academically accessible by removing it from the social forces that produced it.
The Bestseller Lists: A Symptom of Political Crisis
The commercial success of the IfZ edition was dismissed as a harmless curiosity, but it actually served as a warning. Its rise to bestseller status occurred amid a backdrop that included the ascent of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the mainstreaming of anti-refugee policies by established parties, the resurgence of far-right movements across Europe, and the weakening of the postwar political consensus amid capitalist crises. The fact that a scholarly edition, rather than a cheap pamphlet, topped the charts tells us little about its readers’ political leanings. However, it confirms a significant public appetite for direct engagement with the foundational text of National Socialism. The German ruling class has spent decades pretending this interest didn’t exist, but the bestseller lists show otherwise.
This appetite is intentional, reflecting a political climate where nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism have been normalised by the very parties claiming to uphold democracy. The AfD did not appear out of nowhere; CDU/CSU, SPD, and FDP policies shaped it —both indirectly and directly—by long prioritising austerity, militarism, and anti-refugee rhetoric, which the far right later exploited. The resurgence of Mein Kampf thus signals a ruling class that, facing its deepest crisis since World War II, is once again willing to legitimise the extreme right.
The IfZ edition thoroughly corrects historical inaccuracies but omits discussion of fascism’s political economy. This omission is deliberate and highlights the ideological boundaries of bourgeois historiography. A comprehensive analysis of fascism should examine: the involvement of German big business in funding the Nazi Party, the class forces opposing the German Communist Party (KPD) and Social Democracy (SPD), and the culpability of reformist and Stalinist leaders whose policies hindered the working class.
The key cause of the 1933 disaster was the Comintern’s embrace of the “social fascism” theory in 1928. Guided by Stalin, the KPD labelled Social Democracy as fascism’s “twin” and cut all relations with SPD workers. By 1931, the KPD even partnered with the Nazis in the Prussian Landtag referendum to remove the SPD-led government — an act Trotsky predicted as a major mistake. Trotsky’s insights remain crucial: Social Democracy relies on the working class for support and cannot stay in power without it. Fascism, however, depends on the petty bourgeoisie and must destroy workers’ organisations to solidify itself. Comparing the two was “absolute balderdash,” leaving Europe’s strongest working class vulnerable at its greatest peril.
The 1933 defeat was not unavoidable; it resulted from leadership betrayals—Stalinist sectarianism on one side and Social Democratic capitulation on the other. The working class was not overwhelmed by a lack of revolutionary potential but because its organisations were led by groups opposed to revolutionary unity. This perspective is missing from the IfZ edition because it highlights the class nature of fascism and the ruling class’s role in its rise. Bourgeois historiography cannot openly recognise this without challenging the legitimacy of the current order.
The resurfacing of Mein Kampf coincides with a political shift in Germany that reflects, albeit distorted, the patterns of the early 1930s. The AfD has transformed from a protest party into a far-right entity deeply embedded in state institutions, with connections in the police, military, and intelligence agencies. Its rhetoric mirrors the ideological themes of National Socialism, including ethnonationalism, historical revisionism, and disdain for parliamentary democracy. More significantly, the traditional parties have facilitated its growth. The SPD and CDU have pursued austerity measures that weakened social protections and increased political unrest. The political elite has adopted militarism, rearmament, and a more assertive foreign policy stance. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has become mainstream, normalising xenophobic narratives that the AfD merely echoes.
The current threat isn’t just the AfD itself, but the fact that the ruling elite is once again preparing to work with the far right, as its predecessors did in the early 1930s. The parties now claiming to “stop the AfD” are actually the ones responsible for creating the conditions that allowed its growth. The popularity of Mein Kampf must be seen in this same light; it’s not merely a cultural artefact but a political warning. Much of the liberal discussion on fascism rests on the idea that the working class is no longer a revolutionary force, but this is an ideological assumption, not a factual analysis.
The Frankfurt School, reflecting on the failures of the 1930s, argued that the working class had been incorporated into mass consumer society. Postmodernism expanded this outlook into a broader rejection of class politics. Modern liberal anti-fascism carries this sense of discouragement, viewing fascism mainly as a cultural or psychological issue rather than a class-related one. Consequently, the approach shifts from active struggle to educational methods, relying on footnotes rather than organisation and emphasising classroom “awareness” over large-scale mobilisation.
Marxism asserts that the working class is the only force capable of preventing fascism, which it sees as a tool used by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The 1933 defeat stemmed from leadership failures, not the working class itself. These lessons are still urgent today. The reappearance of Mein Kampf on Germany’s bestseller lists is not an isolated incident but a sign of the current political climate, where the ruling class, facing a severe crisis in its postwar order, is once again willing to endorse and rehabilitate the far right.
The response to this threat cannot be limited to classroom discussions or footnotes. It demands a Marxist analysis of fascism’s class origins, a critical view of bourgeois democracy’s stability, and the independent political activism of the working class. While the annotated edition of Mein Kampf may correct Hitler’s historical inaccuracies, it cannot explain the causes of fascism’s rise, its victory, or its resurgence today. Only a movement grounded in the political economy of capitalism — equipped with the lessons of 1933 — can effectively confront fascism in the twenty-first century. This is not an academic issue but a political one, and it is urgent.
Timothy W. Ryback’s 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy comes at a time when the publishing world has turned again to Weimar Germany as a moral lesson for modern liberal concerns. The book has received near-universal praise from the mainstream media: Publishers Weekly highlights its “you-are-there urgency,” the New York Times calls it “a gripping reconstruction,” and liberal thinkers like Steven Levitsky and E.J. Dionne see it as a timely warning about democracy’s fragility in the Trump era. This widespread approval is intentional. It shows the ideological role Ryback’s book plays: providing a vivid, archive-rich, yet politically safe narrative of fascism. It is a history of Nazism stripped of its social class context, focusing on institutional breakdowns without addressing the social forces that enabled fascism.
Ryback is an adept researcher and storyteller. His earlier books, such as Hitler’s Private Library, Hitler’s First Victims, and Takeover, established him as a historian of the early Nazi era, skilled at reconstructing the daily political manoeuvres of 1932–33. 53 Days continues this method, relying on thorough archival research including diaries, cabinet minutes, press reports, police notes, and other bureaucratic remnants of a collapsing republic. The structure is straightforward and effective: each chapter focuses on a single day from January 30 to March 23, 1933, illustrating how Hitler steadily transformed his chancellorship into a dictatorship.
However, narrative technique is inherently political. While Ryback’s detailed daily account may have literary value, it sidesteps a crucial issue for any serious history of fascism: why did German capital, despite an active and politically left-leaning working class, choose to give power to Hitler instead of continuing to govern through the faltering Weimar parliamentary system? This question isn’t simply missing; it’s fundamentally absent from a book that argues Hitler ‘used the provisions of the Constitution’ to overthrow democracy, as if the outcome depended on legal loopholes and Hitler’s personal ruthlessness, rather than the ruling class’s outright rejection of bourgeois democracy.
The Liberal Narrative: Fascism as Institutional Failure
Ryback’s interpretive framework aligns with typical modern liberal historiography. Fascism is depicted as an unintended political event, caused by elite misjudgements, weak institutions, and the manipulations of a demagogue. The key figures in his account are the familiar players from Weimar’s last months: Hindenburg, Papen, Schleicher, Göring, and Hitler. The working class, millions strong, organised through trade unions, the SPD, and the KPD, is shown only as a passive backdrop, with little influence on the overall narrative.
This goes beyond mere emphasis; it is fundamentally a political decision. By highlighting the procedural aspects of Hitler’s ascent such as the Reichstag Fire Decree, the purge of the civil service, the banning of newspapers, and the intimidation of deputies before the Enabling Act—Ryback reinforces the false liberal notion that fascism arises only when institutions weaken, norms decay, or elites fail to recognise the threat. From this perspective, democracy is a delicate system that a ruthless leader can tear down by exploiting constitutional flaws.
This account offers reassurance by removing political bias. It indicates that fascism isn’t driven by capitalism’s systemic crisis or used by the ruling class to counter a revolutionary challenge, but is instead a dysfunction of political culture. The message suggests that the key lesson of 1933 is to protect institutions, reinforce norms, and prevent charismatic authoritarian figures. This narrative resonates with the concerns of today’s US Democratic Party and its thinkers.
Ryback and Current historiography
Ryback is not a falsifier like some right-wing revisionists in recent German academia. He does not downplay Hitler’s crimes nor engage in apologetics like Jörg Baberowski, who said Hitler was “not vicious” and an “armchair perpetrator.” Ryback’s account of the Reichstag Fire, the Prussian police purge, and the Enabling Act manoeuvres is accurate and often detailed.
However, mere detail without analysis doesn’t constitute history; it becomes a chronicle. Ryback provides a detailed account of Hitler’s daily movements but fails to explain why the German bourgeoisie chose to install him. He outlines the procedural ways democracy was eroded but neglects the social forces that enabled these actions. He mentions the SPD’s parliamentary protests but does not address the disastrous political stance that led them to refuse to mobilise their millions of members. Additionally, he reports on the KPD’s repression but omits the Stalinist policy of “social fascism,” which prevented a united front with the Social Democrats at a crucial moment. The result is a history in which fascism appears as a kind of bureaucratic coup, executed through decrees and intimidation, rather than as the political expression of a ruling class confronting a revolutionary crisis.
In 53 Days, the most noticeable absence is the working class. Ryback’s story mainly takes place within centres of power: cabinet rooms, presidential offices, police stations, and parliament chambers. The general population appears only as rally crowds or victims of repression. Their political organisations, the SPD, KPD, and trade unions, appear as institutional entities rather than expressions of class struggle.
This absence is deliberate, reflecting the dominant liberal historiographical view that the working class is not a key actor in history. From this perspective, elites, rather than the masses, shape democracy’s course. The fall of Weimar is therefore seen as a result of political missteps, not class conflict.
But the historical record tells a different story. Between 1930 and 1932, Germany experienced a profound revolutionary crisis. The Communist Party grew to six million votes. Mass strikes shook the industrial centres. The SPD still commanded the loyalty of millions of workers. The bourgeoisie faced a situation in which parliamentary democracy could no longer guarantee social stability. The choice of fascism was not a mistake; it was a class strategy.
Ryback’s narrative fails to account for this reality because his approach omits it. A daily record of decrees and cabinet meetings merely outlines events, without explaining the reasons behind those decrees or the significance of the meetings. It only captures the surface, not the deeper dynamics at play.
The SPD and KPD: Betrayal and Catastrophe
Any rigorous Marxist analysis of 1933 must consider the roles of the SPD and the KPD. Ryback, however, overlooks this, treating both parties as institutions caught in repression rather than political entities whose leadership decisions shaped the outcome. The SPD leadership, committed to legality and fearing revolution, refused to mobilise its millions of members against the Nazis. It preferred parliamentary protests to mass action, accepted the dissolution of the Prussian government without resistance, voted for war credits in 1914, suppressed the Spartacist uprising in 1919, and repeated the same pattern in 1933.
Under Stalinist leadership, the KPD adopted the damaging idea of “social fascism,” considering the SPD as the main adversary and refusing to form a united front. This policy, backed by the Comintern, prevented the only effective way to halt Hitler: rallying the working class together. Ryback’s emphasis on elite manoeuvring doesn’t fully explain why the two major workers’ parties, which represented most of the population, couldn’t stop a small group of thugs from taking power. The real cause lies in the betrayals by their leaders, a crucial issue of revolutionary leadership that liberal historians find difficult to address without losing sight of their own class biases.
The Contemporary Political Function of Ryback’s Historiography
The widespread praise for 53 Days underscores its present-day relevance. Critics focus more on its insights into contemporary issues than on historical specifics. They liken aspects of the book to figures like Trump, refer to “authoritarian populism,’ and observe the erosion of democratic norms. Ryback steers clear of direct comparisons, opting instead for subtle allusions to current politics, which one reviewer described as ‘winks.’ The core message is clear: fascism remains a universal threat to democracy, one that demagogues can manipulate to weaken institutions.
This analogy benefits the liberal establishment politically, as it allows them to raise the threat of fascism without addressing the underlying class forces that create it. It recasts fascism as a moral warning rather than a structural outcome of capitalism, implying that defending democracy means strengthening institutions rather than mobilising the working class. This obscures the fact that fascism is not an anomaly but a tool of the bourgeoisie during crises. The WSWS has extensively documented how the reinterpretation of Nazism’s history is linked to the current effort to rehabilitate fascism and prepare for new imperialist wars. Books like Ryback’s, which depict the Nazi rise to power as a compelling story of individual folly, serve to depoliticise fascism, disconnecting it from the class struggle and its crucial lessons for the working class today.
Ryback’s book functions more as a chronicle than a comprehensive history. It narrates events but does not explain them. The book reconstructs how dictatorship operates but overlooks its social foundations. It provides details without exploring causes, tells stories without offering analysis, and conveys urgency without clarifying underlying understanding. This approach stems from his method. A detailed, day-by-day account captures the events’ texture but not their significance.
It illustrates how Hitler dismantled democracy but not why the bourgeoisie permitted it. It documents the SPD’s parliamentary protests but ignores the political strategies that rendered those protests ineffective. It recounts the KPD’s repression but fails to consider the Stalinist policies that hindered a united front. Consequently, the book is vivid and easy to read but lacks political substance, presenting a liberal narrative of fascism that omits its class-based context.
A comprehensive history of the Nazi rise to power must start with the understanding that fascism is a class-based phenomenon rather than a moral failure. It should analyse the crisis within German capitalism after 1929, the revolutionary potential of the working class, the political tactics of the SPD and KPD, the influence of the Comintern under Stalin, the bourgeoisie’s choice to abandon parliamentary democracy, and fascism’s role as a tool of counter-revolution. The working class should be regarded as the key agent of history, not merely a passive background. Additionally, it must address Trotsky’s question in his writings on Germany: why did the workers’ movement, which represented the vast majority of society, fail to stop a minority party from seizing power? Ryback’s book doesn’t answer this because it doesn’t pose this question.
’53 Days’ serves as a competent recounting of events but falls short as an analysis. While it has documentary value, it offers little political insight. It sketches the surface of events without delving into their deeper causes. The book narrates the history of fascism in a way that reassures liberal fears, yet it conceals the class forces behind the 1933 catastrophe. Those wanting to understand not just Hitler’s daily actions but why the German bourgeoisie chose to install him and why the SPD and KPD couldn’t stop it won’t find that explanation here. Instead, they should consult Trotsky’s writings from 1930–33, which offer the clearest analysis of the catastrophe, while Ryback merely narrates from an outsider perspective. His account focuses on events, not causes. It’s a vivid, readable book, but politically evasive, presenting fascism as a liberal story stripped of its class dynamics. In today’s context, that approach is not only insufficient but also dangerous.
Notes
I. Primary Sources (Weimar and Nazi Period)
Government Documents and Legal Texts
Verordnung des Reichspräsidenten zum Schutz von Volk und Staat (Reichstag Fire Decree), 28 February 1933.
Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (Enabling Act), 23 March 1933.
Proceedings of the German Supreme Court, 25 September 1930 (Hitler’s testimony on constitutional strategy).
Summarised in Ryback’s description: Hitler outlined his plan to destroy the Weimar Republic “through democratic means,” replying “Jawohl!” when asked if only through constitutional means.
Nazi Party and State Publications
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925–26).
Ryback’s book explicitly frames Hitler’s actions as drawn from his “800‑page political playbook.”
Joseph Goebbels, Essays (various editions).
Ryback quotes the introduction’s line: “The big joke on democracy is that it provides its mortal enemies with the means to its own destruction.”
Contemporary Press and Archival Material
Vossische Zeitung, Berliner Tageblatt, Rote Fahne, Vorwärts (1930–33).
Prussian Interior Ministry memoranda (1932–33).
Reichstag stenographic records (1930–33).
Police reports on the Reichstag Fire (February–March 1933).
II. Works by Timothy W. Ryback
Books
Ryback, Timothy W. 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy. Grove/Atlantic, 2026.
Bibliographic details: Grove/Atlantic, ISBN 9780802168245, 256 pages.
Publisher listing: Atlantic Monthly Press, publication date 1 September 2026.
Ryback, Timothy W. Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power. (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024).
Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler’s First Victims (2014).
Ryback, Timothy W. Hitler’s Private Library (2008).
Articles
Ryback, Timothy W. “53 Days.” The Atlantic, January 2025.
The book “greatly expands” this article, which was the magazine’s most‑read piece for over a month.
III. Contemporary Reviews and Publisher Material
Publisher Descriptions
Grove Atlantic, “53 Days | Grove Atlantic.”
Provides a summary of Hitler’s constitutional dismantling of democracy and Ryback’s narrative method.
Library and Catalogue Entries
Lennox & Addington County Library, 53 Days listing.
Notes expansion from the 2025 Atlantic article and summarises critical reception.
Press Reviews
Publishers Weekly, review of 53 Days.
Emphasises Hitler’s use of “constitutionally sanctioned” manoeuvring and the “acquiescence of democracy’s supposed defenders.”
Library Journal, review of 53 Days.
Notes Ryback’s continuation of his exploration of Weimar’s dissolution.
New York Times, review of 53 Days (2026).
Literary Hub, “Most Anticipated Books of 2026.”
Praises Ryback’s “brisk narrative” and “titrated detail.”
IV. Marxist and Trotskyist Sources (Essential for Your Critique)
Leon Trotsky: Writings on Germany
These are the foundational texts for any Marxist analysis of the Nazi seizure of power:
Trotsky, Leon. The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1930–33).
Trotsky, Leon. “What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat” (1932).
Trotsky, Leon. “The Only Road” (1932).
Trotsky, Leon. “The German Catastrophe” (1933).
Trotsky, Leon. “The Tragedy of the German Proletariat” (1933).
ICFI / WSWS Analyses
Vandreier, Christoph. Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany (Mehring Books, 2018).
North, David. The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo‑Left (Mehring Books, 2015).
WSWS Editorial Board, “The Neo‑Nazi Offensive and the Role of German Historians” (2018).
WSWS reviews of Adam Tooze, Richard Evans, Ian Kershaw, and the Historikerstreit.
V. Secondary Scholarship on Fascism, Weimar, and the German Working Class
Marxist and Left Scholarship
Harman, Chris. The Lost Revolution: Germany 1918–1923.
Broué, Pierre. The German Revolution 1917–1923.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labour.
Fischer, Conan. The Rise of the Nazis.
Thalheimer, August. On Fascism (1930).
Critical Historiography of Fascism
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: Hubris and Nemesis.
Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich.
Mommsen, Hans. The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy.
Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity.
Winkler, Heinrich August. Weimar 1918–1933: The Illusion of Normalcy.
Studies of SPD and KPD Strategy
Fowkes, Ben. The German Left and the Weimar Republic.
Kolb, Eberhard. The Weimar Republic.
Broué, Pierre. The German Communist Party and the Comintern.
Political Economy of Fascism
Poulantzas, Nicos. Fascism and Dictatorship.
Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism.
Sohn‑Rethel, Alfred. Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism.
VI. Works on Liberal Historiography and Its Limits
Critiques of Liberal Approaches
Losurdo, Domenico. War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century.
Traverso, Enzo. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945.
Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century.
Studies of Democratic “Fragility” Narratives
Levitsky, Steven & Ziblatt, Daniel. How Democracies Die.
Frequently cited by reviewers of Ryback’s book as a parallel.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny.
VII. Additional Contextual Sources
Weimar Political Culture
Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider.
Berman, Sheri. The Social Democratic Moment.
Reichswehr and Big Business
Turner, Henry Ashby. German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler.
Overy, Richard. The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
Mark Olden’s Murder in Notting Hill is a powerful example of investigative journalism. It carefully reconstructs the racially motivated killing of Kelso Cochrane in 1959, overcoming decades of official silence. Olden pinpoints the probable suspect, uncovers the police cover-up, and reveals the political motives behind the authorities’ responses. However, despite these achievements, the book ultimately refrains from drawing the broader political conclusions that its evidence suggests.
A killer known, a case buried
Olden started investigating the case in 2005 and soon realised what many in Notting Hill had known since the night of the murder: the identity of Cochrane’s attacker was an open secret. By interviewing witnesses and relatives of the main suspect, he was able to piece together the events that led to the killing and scrutinise how the two men initially arrested were handled. Their conflicting stories were subtly coordinated after they shared adjoining cells, and both were eventually released without any charges.
His earlier work on the BBC documentary Who Killed My Brother? provided him with access to witnesses and records that few independent writers could reach. Yet, at the National Archives, he faced many obstacles. The relevant files were kept sealed until 2044 or 2054 for “law-enforcement” reasons, even though the prime suspect had already died. Only persistent pressure from Cochrane’s family led to their early release. What these files uncovered was not just a failure to bring a murderer to justice, but evidence of a political plan.
The state’s priority: containing unrest, not confronting fascism
The documents reveal that the Labour government and the Metropolitan Police prioritised controlling the aftermath of the 1958 racist riots in Notting Hill and Nottingham over solving Cochrane’s murder. Their main concern was that anti-fascist activism, especially among Black and working-class youth, might spiral out of official control. The murder was viewed not as an act committed by organised fascists but as a public order threat requiring suppression.
Olden accurately determines that the killing was planned and organised by fascist groups. However, he does not explore the wider implications. The state’s reaction was not an anomaly; it reflects a consistent pattern where British governments have downplayed far-right violence and viewed anti-racist activism as a challenge to be managed. While his analogy with the Stephen Lawrence case is fitting, the crucial question—why the state acts in this manner—remains largely unexamined.
Kelso Cochrane and the Pseudo‑Lefts
The racially motivated murder of Kelso Cochrane in Notting Hill in 1959 is a stark example of postwar Britain’s issues. It was more than just a killing; it was a political act following fascist-organised violence, with a cover-up by the state lasting over fifty years. Mark Olden’s Murder in Notting Hill details the crime with clarity, identifying the probable culprit and uncovering the system that protected him from trial. However, the book stops short of analysing the political contexts that allowed the murder to happen. This reflects a broader pattern of avoidance frequently seen in Britain’s pseudo-left movements.
Olden’s research uncovered what many in Notting Hill have known since 1959: the identity of Cochrane’s killer was an open secret. Witnesses and family members pointed to a specific individual whose conflicting statements were quietly managed by police after he and another suspect were held in adjoining cells. The National Archives tried to keep the relevant files sealed until the mid-21st century, citing “law-enforcement” reasons, even though the prime suspect had been long deceased. Only pressure from Cochrane’s family led to their release. The documents revealed that the Labour government and the Metropolitan Police were more concerned with maintaining order, suppressing anti-fascist protests, and hiding organised fascist activity than solving the murder.
Olden’s book is strong in journalism but weak in political analysis. It suggests that racist violence in the late 1950s was a reflection of white working-class prejudices. This view distorts the class dynamics of that period. Cliff Slaughter, writing at the time, attributed the riots and murders to the economic crisis of the late 1950s—characterised by rising unemployment, insecurity, and deliberate racial scapegoating by political and media institutions. Fascism did not emerge spontaneously from “working-class racism”; rather, it was financed, organised, and exploited by sections of the ruling class. Its goal was to redirect working-class anger away from capital and onto racial minorities and to involve the most atomised workers and petty bourgeoisie in a movement against the entire working class.
Trotsky’s summation remains decisive: fascism triumphs only where the working class proves unable to take society’s fate into its own hands. This is precisely the analysis the pseudo-lefts have spent decades avoiding. Their narratives reduce racist violence to cultural prejudice, “whiteness,” or the moral failings of ordinary people. They treat fascism as a pathology rather than a weapon of class rule. In doing so, they reproduce the same blind spot that weakens Olden’s otherwise impressive book. They obscure the link between capitalist crisis and the growth of fascism and erase the revolutionary potential of the working class by portraying it as either inert or reactionary.
Where the book falters: the politics of fascism
Olden’s narrative suggests that the white working class in the late 1950s was either indifferent to or complicit in racist violence. However, this view is one-sided and masks the complex class dynamics of that era.
In Labour Review, Cliff Slaughter provided a far deeper analysis of the 1958 Notting Hill and Nottingham riots than anything found in contemporary journalism or in Olden’s account. Writing as the events unfolded, Slaughter rejected the notion that the violence expressed some innate racism within the working class. He located its origins in the economic crisis of the late 1950s: rising unemployment, casualised labour, and the deliberate cultivation of racial scapegoating by political and media institutions. Fascist groups, he argued, were able to operate because they served definite class interests.
Their agitation diverted anger away from capital and onto racial minorities, while offering the ruling class a means of recruiting the most atomised layers of workers and the petty bourgeoisie into a movement directed against the working class as a whole. Slaughter’s analysis aligned with Trotsky’s essential insight that fascism is not a spontaneous eruption of prejudice but a political project financed and tolerated by sections of big business, emerging in periods when the ruling class can no longer govern through parliamentary means.
Trotsky’s key insight remains crucial: fascism isn’t a mere spontaneous outburst of popular prejudice. Instead, it is a political strategy funded by parts of big business, intended to destroy working-class organisation when the ruling class can no longer govern through parliamentary channels. Fascism succeeds only when the working class cannot control the direction of society.
This framework is missing from Olden’s book. Consequently, Kelso Cochrane’s murder is seen as a tragic event within a racist society rather than as part of a wider political crisis. In this situation, the ruling class tolerated fascist violence to maintain social stability.
Conclusion
Murder in Notting Hill effectively exposes a government cover-up, identifying the killer, reconstructing the crime, and unveiling the institutional forces that concealed the truth for decades. However, it omits discussion of the political dynamics that led to both the murder and the cover-up. Those interested in understanding why fascism gained ground in 1950s Britain—and how to oppose it today—must look elsewhere. The origins of fascism are rooted not in the prejudices of ordinary individuals but in the crises of capitalism and the political tactics of the ruling elite. Without that analysis, Kelso Cochrane’s murder risks being viewed solely as a historical injustice, rather than part of an ongoing struggle over the future of the working class.
Sources and Bibliography
Primary Sources
National Archives, Kew
MEPO (Metropolitan Police) files relating to the investigation into the murder of Kelso Cochrane (released early following legal pressure from the Cochrane family).
Home Office papers on race relations, public order, and far‑right activity in Notting Hill and Nottingham, 1958–59.
BBC Documentary
Who Killed My Brother? (BBC, 2006). Produced with research contributions from Mark Olden; includes interviews with witnesses and family members.
Contemporaneous Marxist Analysis
Slaughter, Cliff. “The Riots: A Class Analysis.” Labour Review, 1958–59. (Trotskyist interpretation of the Notting Hill and Nottingham unrest, locating fascist agitation within the crisis of British capitalism.)
Books and Scholarly Works
Olden, Mark.Murder in Notting Hill. Zero Books, 2011. Investigative reconstruction of the Cochrane case, drawing on interviews and newly released archival material.
Trotsky, Leon.The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Pathfinder Press. Foundational Marxist analysis of fascism as a class project rooted in capitalist crisis.
Fryer, Peter.Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. Pluto Press, 1984. Essential background on Black British history, including postwar migration and racist violence.
Richards, Steve.Race, Riots and Policing: The Origins of the Notting Hill Riots. A detailed study of the 1958 unrest and the political context in which Cochrane was murdered.
Gilroy, Paul.There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. Hutchinson, 1987. Analysis of race, nationalism, and state power in postwar Britain.
Lawrence Inquiry (Macpherson Report).The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny. HMSO, 1999. Key document on institutional racism in British policing; relevant for parallels with the Cochrane case.
Articles and Secondary Literature
Fielding, Steven. “The Labour Party and Race Relations, 1945–1965.” Twentieth Century British History. Examines Labour’s political handling of race and public order during the period of the Cochrane murder.
Ward, Paul. “Fascism in Postwar Britain.” Journal of Contemporary History. Overview of far‑right organising and its relationship to state institutions.
Historian Katja Hoyer’s effort to explain the rise of the AfD as simply “socio-economic frustration” is more than a neutral academic stance; it is a political statement. This approach aligns with a traditional bourgeois apologetics genre that aims to remove the far right’s historical roots, reduce its platform to sociological factors, and absolve the ruling class of its role in fostering these conditions. Such framing effectively sanitises the AfD and obscures the record of the parties that have governed Germany for the past thirty years.
Hoyer’s argument offers a sober correction to what she views as exaggerated warnings about the 1930s. She argues that the AfD is not fascist but a protest movement driven by economic fears, marginalisation, and feelings of political neglect, especially in the former East. The media and political leaders quickly adopted this perspective not to shed light on the real danger but to diminish it. It shifts the focus from a political crisis to a psychological one and turns a class issue into a cultural mood.
Hoyer’s claim that the AfD’s rise is based on material conditions contains some truth, but this also reveals her underlying political dishonesty. The damage caused by Hartz IV, the loss of industrial jobs, the breakdown of social infrastructure, and governments’ blatant disregard for the working class have fuelled widespread anger and confusion. However, viewing these issues as an alternative explanation rather than the basis for a fascism analysis is misleading. It distorts historical facts and misrepresents current realities.
Crisis, Class, and Political Form
Leon Trotsky did not view the rise of fascism as a mere psychological or cultural failing. Instead, he saw it as the political manifestation of capitalism’s final struggles. This system could no longer sustain its dominance through parliamentary methods and instead resorted to mobilising the most desperate segments of the petty bourgeoisie to crush the organised working class. Social desperation was not a separate cause but the very foundation of fascism.
Hoyer’s framing breaks this link. Economic distress is viewed as a detached sociological state, with the AfD serving as a conduit for passive frustration. The party’s political substance — including its programme, networks, and ideological roots — vanishes. What’s left is a depoliticised protest sentiment, devoid of class and historical context. This isn’t analysis. It’s ideological disarmament.
Hoyer, the Pseudo‑Lefts, and the Whitewashing of the AfD
Hoyer’s assertion that the rise of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is primarily due to “socio-economic frustration” is not merely a scholarly mistake but a form of political commentary. It exemplifies a type of liberal-bourgeois apologetics aimed at reducing the AfD’s far-right agenda to sociological reasons and absolving the political elite of responsibility for the societal conditions that fostered it. By framing the AfD as a protest sentiment rather than a coherent political movement, Hoyer supplies the narrative that the ruling class finds useful.
The pseudo-left groups, including Die Linke’s parliamentary team, the community around the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, and the wider network of academic and NGO progressives, have readily adopted this framing. Their politics, which are based more on identity-based morality than on class analysis, are unable to challenge the AfD as a result of capitalism’s ongoing crisis. Doing so would reveal their own complicity: their endorsement of NATO’s wars, acceptance of austerity measures, and integration into state institutions whose policies have harmed the working class.
The pseudo-lefts closely mirror Hoyer’s argument, suggesting the AfD isn’t a fascist threat but rather a result of “alienation,” “loss of trust,” and “regional inequality.” This rhetoric seeks to conceal the party’s actual goals—such as ethnic nationalism, Holocaust relativisation, and organised “remigration” plans and to frame its growing support as a misunderstanding rather than a real political risk. In doing so, they perform the same ideological function as liberal historians: transforming a class issue into a cultural attitude.
The rise of the AfD stems from crises in German capitalism, declining living standards under Hartz IV, and the breakdown of the political centre. Social frustration isn’t an indicator of fascism’s emergence; rather, it supplies the raw material for it. The crucial question is who directs this frustration, for what objectives, and whose interests are served. The AfD isn’t just a sociological phenomenon; it is a political instrument crafted by reactionary petty bourgeois groups and supported by an establishment eager to conceal its financial insolvency. Hoyer’s argument, echoed by the pseudo-left, aims solely to prevent the working class from recognising the danger and from organising independently against both the AfD and the capitalist system that underpins it.
Why the Establishment Needs Hoyer’s Thesis
What “socio-economic frustration” conveniently masks is the true political nature of the AfD. Its leadership and core members come from the Identitarian movement and the “New Right” intellectual circles, include Holocaust relativists and admirers of the Nazi past, and are linked through ethnic-nationalist networks advocating ‘remigration.’ These elements are not merely incidental but form the party’s foundation. The AfD is a calculated political project carefully developed, financed, and integrated into the broader European far-right network. Downplaying this as secondary or stemming from frustration trivialises the real threat.
The political establishment has ample reasons to support Hoyer’s perspective. Over the past thirty years, parties like the SPD, Greens, CDU/CSU, and Die Linke have enforced austerity measures, reduced social protections, militarised foreign policy, and criminalised opposition. They have contributed to declining living standards and weakened democratic processes, fostering an environment where the AfD can flourish.
Acknowledging this means facing their own accountability. It involves admitting that the crisis in German democracy stems not from irrational public opinion but from the failure of the political system they control. Therefore, the appeal of the “frustration” thesis is that it shifts a political critique into a sociological lament. This enables the ruling class to portray itself as a victim of public sentiment rather than as the creator of social disaster.
The Scholarly Debate: What It Clarifies — and What It Obscures
Hoyer’s view aligns with a prominent segment of mainstream scholarship. Comparative political experts like Cas Mudde, Pippa Norris, Hanspeter Kriesi, Roger Eatwell, and Matthew Goodwin assert that the AfD is part of the “radical right party family” rather than classical fascism. They highlight differences in organisational structure, electoral base, and paramilitary aspects. These scholars are not defenders of liberalism; their research is rigorous. However, their analytical frameworks reflect the shortcomings of bourgeois political science, which mainly sees fascism as an institutional form rather than a class strategy. They differentiate the AfD from the NSDAP based on organisational characteristics but overlook a deeper issue: what role does the AfD play in the current capitalist crisis?
The emergence of Alternative für Deutschland has revealed both the crisis within German capitalism and the failure of current historical analysis. Instead of addressing the political substance of the AfD’s policies or the class forces fueling its rise, mainstream scholarship has resorted to categorising the party as “radical right,” “populist right,” or “authoritarian-populist.” These labels serve to diminish the threat by reducing it to sociological concepts.
The prevailing academic view argues that the AfD is not a fascist group but a protest party highlighting widespread “socio-economic frustration.” Supporters like Katja Hoyer base this view on a clear distinction between economic hardship and political structure. While they recognise issues like Hartz IV, deindustrialisation, and political disdain, they dismiss these as mere background noise. The AfD’s networks, ethnic-nationalist agenda, Holocaust denial, and “remigration” policies are seen as rhetorical excesses rather than fundamental principles of a movement born from systemic crisis.
This is not true analysis but ideological evasion. By portraying the AfD as just a mood instead of a political project, historiography shirks responsibility from the ruling parties SPD, Greens, CDU/CSU, and Die Linke for the social disaster they have caused. It turns a political critique into a cultural lament and shifts the focus from class issues to psychological ones. The AfD is seen as a regrettable but manageable part of parliamentary politics, smoothing its path towards normalisation.
Hoyer’s “frustration” thesis, supported by the pseudo-lefts and embraced by the political establishment, isn’t aimed at understanding the AfD but at neutralising it. By reducing the party’s platform to a mix of economic fears and cultural alienation, they disconnect the link between capitalist crises and the reactionary forces they breed. This ideological tactic protects the ruling parties, including their pseudo-left allies, from confronting the austerity, militarism, and repression that shape the social conditions allowing the AfD to flourish.
The AfD is not simply a sociological reaction. Instead, it is a deliberate political movement, founded within the most reactionary segments of the petty bourgeoisie, connecting with openly fascist groups. Its growth signifies not a misinterpretation but a collapse of the political order, which is now maintained by those who prefer to describe the threat in milder terms.
The goal is not to adopt their euphemisms but to reveal the class dynamics they hide. Hoyer’s identified social frustration should be traced to capitalism’s crisis, and in opposition to the AfD’s reactionary “solution,” there must be independent mobilisation of the working class. Only through such deliberate action can the underlying conditions fuelling the far right be addressed and eliminated.
Sources and Bibliography
Hoyer, Katja.The AfD is flirting with Nazi history – but moral outrage alone won’t stop the far right.The Guardian, 23 February 2026. Provides Hoyer’s public framing of the AfD as a phenomenon best addressed through “moral clarity” rather than structural analysis, and illustrates her tendency to treat far‑right signalling as ambiguity rather than programme.
Fenemore, Mark. Review of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990 by Katja Hoyer. German History, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2024), pp. 145–147. Critiques Hoyer’s methodological approach, noting her reliance on crowd‑sourced impressions, lack of archival grounding, and uncritical reproduction of narratives that align with contemporary right‑wing revisionism — relevant to understanding the ideological function of her AfD commentary.
Nicole, Jean‑Thomas. Review of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe by Katja Hoyer. The Cypher Brief, 9 June 2026. Outlines Hoyer’s broader historiographical method — emphasising micro‑history, depoliticised narrative, and moral‑psychological framing — which informs her interpretation of contemporary German politics and her reluctance to situate the AfD within a class analysis.
Suggested Additional Scholarly Context
(These are standard academic references for situating the AfD within current historiography. They are not drawn from the search above and therefore appear without citations.)
Mudde, Cas.The Far Right Today. Polity Press, 2019. Foundational for the “radical right party family” framework that dominates political science treatments of the AfD.
Eatwell, Roger & Goodwin, Matthew.National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Penguin, 2018. Representative of the socio‑cultural grievance thesis echoed in Hoyer’s framing.
Perry, Joe. “The AfD and the Crisis of German Democracy.” Central European History, 2022. Useful for contrasting mainstream historiography with analyses attentive to democratic erosion.
Trotsky, Leon.The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany. Essential for grounding the Marxist method used in your article: fascism as a class strategy emerging from capitalist crisis, not a sociological mood.
Vandreier, Christoph. Why Are They Back? Historical Falsification, Political Conspiracy, and the Return of Fascism in Germany. Mehring Books, 2019.A central Marxist analysis of the far‑right resurgence in Germany. Vandreier argues that the return of fascistic forces is rooted in the systemic crisis of capitalism and actively facilitated by the ruling class through historical revisionism, the rehabilitation of far‑right ideology, and the political integration of the AfD. Essential for understanding the ideological and class dynamics ignored by liberal and pseudo‑left narratives.
The Moralization of History in an Age of Political Reaction
Katja Hoyer’s recent essay, ‘From Housemaid to Camp Guard,’ examines how ordinary people can commit acts of evil. Although it appears to emphasise the role of structural and systemic factors in fascist violence, it actually highlights a broader tendency in modern popular history. This trend reduces intricate political and economic dynamics into moral tales, psychological stories, and personal biographies.
This approach—blaming individuals for historical guilt—is more than style; it’s an ideological tactic. It transforms fascism from a consequence of capitalist crises into an ongoing moral danger concealed within “ordinary people.” This method replaces analysis with emotion, structural understanding with narrative, and class with personal characteristics. In effect, it strips away political context from history, prioritising a moralistic story over deeper explanation.
Hoyer’s essay is more than merely inadequate; it reflects a wider cultural and political change: the erosion of historical awareness amid capitalist decline, the dominance of platform-driven “content” replacing traditional historiography, and the ruling class’s ideological effort to depoliticise history when its lessons are most critical.
Biography as Ideology: The Retreat from Structure
Hoyer’s essay centres on a biographical case study featuring Hermine Braunsteiner, infamous as the “Stomping Mare” of Majdanek. It presents her as a complex psychological figure—a troubling progression from a domestic worker to a camp guard. The reader is invited to reflect on her “choices,” her “path,” and her “transformation.” The narrative’s structure seeks to provoke moral reflection rather than enhance political understanding.
This emphasis on biography is widespread beyond Hoyer and is typical in popular history, especially during political backlash. Incorporating biographical anecdotes allows historians to suggest complexity without engaging in detailed structural analysis. It also enables readers to feel morally connected without tackling the political economy of fascism. Consequently, this approach shifts the perception of perpetrators from systemic actors to psychological curiosities.
This mode highlights what a materialist historiography would emphasise: the class makeup of the SS, the economic issues in Depression-era Austria and Germany, the gender-specific recruitment tactics of the Nazi regime, the backing of fascism by German financial elites, and the Federal Republic’s effort to rehabilitate camp staff after WWII. Braunsteiner’s life isn’t a moral lesson; rather, it’s a case study illustrating how capitalism mobilises, disciplines, and weaponises human labour during crises. Conversely, Hoyer’s approach conceals this underlying reality.
The Arendtian Legacy: Banality Without Structure
Hoyer’s framing—“ordinary people doing evil things”—directly draws from the Arendtian tradition. However, while Hannah Arendt’s work engaged with the mechanisms of the totalitarian regime, Hoyer’s interpretation is a simplified, moralised version that lacks political context. Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” shifted focus from ideological extremism to bureaucratic normality, paving the way for a psychological view of fascism: viewing evil as thoughtlessness, obedience, and conformity. Nonetheless, Arendt’s own writings remain ambivalent, caught between philosophical ideas and specific historical circumstances.
Hoyer retains only the abstract concept. She transforms the banal evil into a universal moral risk, making fascism a constant human potential. The reader is encouraged to worry about the weakness of conscience rather than capitalism’s crisis. The structural causes of fascism—the breakdown of parliamentary democracy, the rise of paramilitary violence, and the Nazi-industrial alliance—disappear from view. Arendt’s complex ideas are reduced to evasions in Hoyer’s approach.
Goldhagen’s Shadow: Voluntarism Without Politics
If Arendt explained fascism as arising from thoughtlessness, Daniel Goldhagen attributed it to deliberate hatred. His argument—that ordinary Germans were “willing executioners” motivated by a distinct eliminationist anti-Semitism—shifts focus from structural causes to cultural essentialism. Hoyer’s story echoes this voluntarist perspective. Braunsteiner’s actions are portrayed as personal decisions, moral lapses, or a psychological decline. Readers are encouraged to consider her cruelty as an individual moral failure rather than a consequence of systemic factors.
Goldhagen’s voluntarism, similar to Arendt’s concept of banality, serves an ideological purpose: it shifts blame away from the ruling class. When fascism is attributed to hatred or thoughtlessness, the influence of the capital, state, and military vanishes from the explanation. This directs attention to the perpetrators while rendering the systemic structures unseen. Hoyer’s essay exemplifies this pattern, presenting more than just a moral story; it functions as a form of political avoidance.
A materialist approach to the history of fascism starts with class analysis. Fascism is not an ethical anomaly but a class-based tactic. It emerges when the ruling elite can no longer maintain power through parliamentary channels and resort to extra-parliamentary violence to oppress workers. In this view, Braunsteiner’s life is understood not as a psychological mystery but as a product of structural forces: her recruitment into the SS was driven by the economic hardship faced by working-class women in Depression-era Austria. Her participation in the camp system was part of a bureaucratic setup designed to enforce racialised labour discipline. Her later anonymity in Queens was preserved by the political interests of the Federal Republic, which reabsorbed thousands of fascist affiliates to uphold bourgeois stability.
Hoyer’s essay does not include any of these aspects. It omits the class character of fascism, the Nazi state’s political economy, and the connection between fascist and postwar bourgeois institutions. As a result, the narrative tends to psychologize, moralise, and personalise fascism, but it never explains.
Substack as Historiographical Medium
Katja Hoyer’s recent work is deeply connected to its medium. Her Substack newsletter, Zeitgeist, functions not just as a platform but as a historiographical form influenced by platform capitalism’s economic principles. Substack’s subscription model—personality-driven, serial, and emotionally tuned—encourages trends that have diminished the quality of popular historical writing in the neoliberal age: favouring anecdotes over analysis, moral reflection over structural insights, and psychological storytelling over political economy.
Substack turns the historian into a personal brand. Subscribers follow not just for historical facts, but for the persona the historian projects. The historian’s voice becomes the main attraction, with the past serving as a setting for its display. This change is deliberate and structural, driven by the platform’s need for frequent content, which limits in-depth archival work and promotes episodic stories. Its focus on emotional connection prioritises moral stories—like “chilling” lives, “ordinary” individuals, and “extreme” decisions—over meaningful analysis of class, government, or capitalism.
Hoyer’s essays exemplify this approach well. They follow a steady pattern: starting with a biographical hook, then providing a psychological perspective, and concluding with a gentle liberal lesson. The past is depicted more as a mood to be experienced than as a political process. Fascism is portrayed as a moral issue rather than a class strategy. The GDR is shown as a nostalgic scene rather than a state with a specific social identity. The Cold War is described through human-interest stories rather than as a global clash of social systems.
This is more than just a stylistic choice; it serves an ideological purpose inherent to the medium. Substack’s favoured format—the serialised moral story—personalises historical responsibility, exaggerates dangers universally, and omits structural causality. This creates a sense of history that is emotionally comprehensible yet politically passive. It caters to a middle-class audience that desires engagement without discomfort, reflection without critique, and memory that avoids political implications.
Hoyer’s choice of Substack highlights more than her personal approach; it underscores a wider shift in historical writing driven by platform capitalism. This shift turns history into consumable content, transforms the historian into an influencer, and frames historical awareness as a commodity that serves the ideological demands of a crisis-ridden era.
Substack and the Rebranding of “Ordinary Germans”
Substack has become a key platform where modern writers reshape German history for a mostly Anglo-American global audience. Its economic model—focused on subscriptions, personality, and a lack of emphasis on political economy—creates a particular type of historical storytelling. It’s no surprise that Katja Hoyer’s work thrives here, as Substack favours interpretive approaches like anecdotal storytelling, moral psychology, and replacing structural causes with personal narratives.
The platform’s format influences its content. Substack essays tend to be short, emotional, and easy to read quickly. They aren’t suited for in-depth analysis of class struggles, government institutions, or fascism’s political economy. Instead, they focus on personal stories—like the housemaid, the neighbour, or the nostalgic pensioner—as the primary units of historical significance. The “ordinary German” becomes a storytelling device and a moral figure whose life is summarised in 1,500 words, ending with a gentle liberal lesson about “choices,” “complexity,” or “human nature.”
This isn’t merely a stylistic choice but reflects the medium’s ideological role. Substack’s favoured narrative approach tends to individualise historical accountability, turning fascist perpetrators into psychological riddles rather than recognising them as parts of a systemic structure. It broadens the concept of danger—suggesting that “ordinary people can become monsters”—while overlooking the specific class interests, state mechanisms, and economic crises that fuelled the Nazi movement. This shift replaces the political inquiry (“Why did German capital embrace fascism?”) with a moral one (“Why did this woman commit evil acts?”).
In this manner, Substack engages in the larger framework of memory capitalism: transforming the past into easily consumable content that lacks opposition. The “ordinary German” is transformed into a brand category, a narrative archetype enabling the platform to evoke emotional responses without provoking political tensions. The audience is encouraged to experience history emotionally rather than to comprehend it. Consequently, the past is presented as a mood rather than a coherent structure.
Hoyer’s utilisation of Substack is therefore purposeful. It highlights how platform capitalism shapes historical understanding, creating a portrayal of German history in which fascism is moralised, depoliticised, and disconnected from contemporary issues. The “ordinary German” becomes a warning rather than an active participant in a specific social context. This creates a story that is emotionally powerful, politically vague, and closely aligned with the ideological demands of a society in turmoil.
Hoyer’s success in Britain is closely tied to her supportive environment, including outlets like The Spectator, UnHerd, TLS, The Observer, and the broader liberal-conservative commentariat. This scene favours a style of historical writing that is accessible, impartial, and devoid of ideological conflicts. In this framework, Weimar is seen as a symbol of “polarisation” rather than a sign of capitalism’s failure. The GDR is perceived more as a nostalgic scene than a state defined by specific class traits. Fascism is framed as a cautionary tale against ‘extremism,’ rather than a tool used by the ruling class. History is approached as entertainment, not as a platform for critique. Hoyer’s work aligns with this environment, providing German history that is politics-free, memory without hostility, and narratives without causal explanations.
The emphasis on individual guilt in history today serves a contemporary purpose. By portraying fascism as the moral failure of “ordinary people,” the historian diverts blame from the capitalist class that financed Hitler, the state bodies involved in genocide, the postwar governments that reintegrated fascist figures, and the current ruling elite again embracing militarism. This explains why such narratives spread—they enable people to feel morally involved while sidestepping political accountability. They foster guilt without encouraging critical analysis, promote self-reflection without critique, and evoke memory without considering historical context. Consequently, Hoyer’s essay is not just lacking; it actively functions politically by supporting the ongoing effort to depoliticise history, aligning with the rightward shift in European politics.
Serious historiography aims to explain the past, not moralise about it. Fascism isn’t merely a psychological temptation; it is a class phenomenon that emerges from capitalist crises, not human nature. Specific institutions enable it, not personal choices. Preventing its recurrence requires conscious political action by the working class. Hoyer’s essay, along with its broader trend, obscures this understanding by substituting explanation with anecdote, structure with story, and politics with morality. This shifts fascism from a concrete product of capitalist crisis into a timeless moral hazard. In contrast, a materialist historiography emphasises that understanding the past is essential to addressing the present, warning against the ideological trap of individualising guilt.
Sources and Bibliography
I. Academic Sources on Memory, Capitalism, and Media
Pilkington, Danny. Myopic Memory: Capitalism’s New Continuity in the Age of AI. Memory, Mind & Media, Vol. 3 (2024). A commentary on how neoliberalism and capitalist technological development constrain social memory and critical reflection.
Erll, Astrid; Rigney, Ann; Wüstenberg, Jenny (eds.). Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilisation: Doing Memory Studies With Ann Rigney. De Gruyter, 2025. A major contribution to the study of mediated memory and its political uses.
Rigney, Ann & Merrill, Samuel (eds.). Remembering Activism: Explorations in the Memory–Activism Nexus. Memory Studies, 17(5), 2024. Explores how memory is mobilised in contemporary political contexts.
Chidgey, Red & Garde-Hansen, Joanne. Museums, Archives and Protest Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. Useful for understanding institutional mediation of memory.
Reading, Anna. Autistic Dreaming: Vibrant Memory, Activism and Environment. Berghahn, 2025. A study of memory practices under contemporary social conditions.
Erbil, Deniz; Rigney, Ann; Vlessing, Clara (eds.). Remembering Contentious Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. On the politics of remembering individuals within broader social conflicts.
II. Sources on Memory Culture, Digital Platforms, and Substack
The Memory Palace (Substack). A Substack publication dedicated to the philosophy of memory, illustrating how academic memory discourse is migrating to platform‑based media.
Hoskins, Andrew. Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition. Routledge, 2018. Foundational for understanding how digital platforms reshape historical consciousness.
van Dijck, José. The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press, 2013. Essential for situating Substack within the broader political economy of platform capitalism.
Couldry, Nick & Mejias, Ulises. The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonising Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism. Stanford University Press, 2019. Critical for theorising how platforms commodify human expression, including historical narrative.
Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Polity, 2010. A theoretical precursor to understanding Substack’s affective economy.
III. Historiography, Fascism, and the “Ordinary Germans” Debate
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Penguin, 1963. The foundational text for the “ordinary people doing evil” paradigm.
Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Knopf, 1996. The most influential voluntarist interpretation of perpetrator agency.
Browning, Christopher. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. HarperCollins, 1992. The classic empirical counterpoint to Goldhagen, grounding perpetrator behaviour in situational and structural factors.
Aly, Götz. Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State. Metropolitan Books, 2007. Shows how material incentives and class interests shaped popular complicity.
Kershaw, Ian. The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. Bloomsbury, 2015. Essential for situating “ordinary Germans” within structural historiography.
North, David. A Marxist Critique of Daniel Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” Detroit: Mehring Books, 1997.
IV. Sources on German Memory Politics and Popular History
Moeller, Robert G. War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany. University of California Press, 2001. On postwar memory politics and the construction of “ordinary German” narratives.
Niven, Bill. The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Useful for contextualising contemporary German memory culture.
Confino, Alon. A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide. Yale University Press, 2014. On the ideological and cultural dimensions of Nazi violence.
V. Sources on Media, Narrative, and the Commodification of History
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003. A foundational text for understanding memory as a cultural commodity.
Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilisation: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge University Press, 2011. On the mediation and institutionalisation of memory.
Garde-Hansen, Joanne. Media and Memory. Edinburgh University Press, 2011. A concise overview of how media forms shape historical consciousness.
Olick, Jeffrey K. The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility. Routledge, 2007. Essential for understanding the moralization of historical guilt.
VI. Sources on Platform Capitalism and Digital Labour
Srnicek, Nick. Platform Capitalism. Polity, 2017. The definitive analysis of the economic logic underpinning platforms like Substack.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019. On how digital platforms commodify human behaviour and expression.
Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Pluto Press, 2004. A foundational text on digital labour and cultural production.
VII. Suggested Primary Sources for Katja Hoyer’s Work
(These are not cited from search; they are standard bibliographic entries.)
Hoyer, Katja. Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918. Penguin, 2021.
Hoyer, Katja. Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990. Penguin, 2023.
Hoyer, Katja. Zeitgeist (Substack newsletter).
Hoyer, Katja. Various essays in The Spectator, UnHerd, The Telegraph, etc.
The Wiener Holocaust Library’s exhibition Nazi Slave Labour: Perpetrators and Victims, now on display in London’s Bloomsbury district, performs an important and overdue service. It confronts visitors with a dimension of the Holocaust that official memory has long marginalised: the vast system of forced and slave labour that underpinned the Nazi war economy and consumed, by the exhibition’s own reckoning, twenty million human beings between 1939 and 1945, of whom 2.5 million perished. In an era when Holocaust remembrance is increasingly aestheticised, moralised, and stripped of historical content, the exhibition’s insistence on the economic foundations of genocide is a welcome corrective.
Two sentences from the exhibition’s accompanying material highlight the scale of what is depicted. It states that I.G. Farben and Krupp “actively ordered human beings as one orders raw material, working them … under ‘life-threatening conditions’ for profit.” However, the exhibition itself never questions, “what social order made this system not an aberration but, for a time, rational?” These two statements embody the core issue of official Holocaust remembrance.
The exhibition highlights the achievement and its limits. The curators rightly challenge the simplistic view separating industrial killing from industrial production. An example—images of a pregnant woman riveting tailfins onto V-1 flying bombs—comes from survivor Eva Clarke’s account of her mother’s experience. This serves as both testimony and a critique of an economic system that prioritised production at the expense of human life. The exhibit emphasises that slave labour was not an extreme ideology but a core part of the Nazi economy.
However, this is where the analysis ends. The exhibition presents its subject as a moral conflict between “perpetrators and victims”—namely, the SS and corporate management versus the enslaved— which is not incorrect but is deeply incomplete. By detaching the moral narrative from the broader social context that created it, the exhibition’s framing obscures more than it clarifies. The slave labour system did not arise in 1942 out of ideological extremism; instead, it was the result of a longstanding partnership between German big business and the Nazi regime, predating Hitler’s rise to power. While the exhibition presents the facts, it avoids drawing this conclusion.
The Political Economy of Slave Labour
The infamous persecution of European Jews and the use of millions of forced labourers were not accidental events imposed on German capitalism from outside forces. Instead, these acts were ingrained in its regular functioning. The economic crisis that hit German industry after the Depression, combined with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the growing threat of socialist revolution, created a situation in which the bourgeoisie viewed fascism as a class-centred solution. The Nazi movement aimed to eliminate the organised working class, restore profitability through militarised production, and pursue imperial expansion into Eastern territories.
Slave labour was not a deviation from capitalist rationality but its intensification under dictatorship. Usually, the wage relation conceals exploitation behind a contract seen as between equals. Nazi slave labour exposed the truth: capital exploits labour-power, and with political restrictions gone, it tends toward the literal consumption of the worker’s body.
Otto Ambros, a chemist for I.G. Farben responsible for organising prisoner exploitation at Buna-Monowitz, informed his board in April 1941 that “our new friendship with the SS is having a very beneficial effect.” Ambros was later convicted at Nuremberg, released in 1951, and quickly became a consultant for major chemical companies and an advisor to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. This is a significant detail, not just a footnote; it encapsulates an important point.
The exhibition’s silence on the capitalist roots of slave labour is deliberate and structural. Companies that financed the Nazi war effort and exploited millions—such as Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst, which succeeded Farben; the Quandt family, now owners of BMW; the Porsche-Piëch family at Volkswagen; Deutsche Bank; and Allianz—were never confiscated, dismantled, or held accountable. Their managerial staff were reinstated because, after 1945, the Western Allies prioritised anti-communism over anti-fascism. This Cold War context required reestablished German capitalism as a defence against the Soviet Union.
The working class that sought justice was politically disarmed by Stalinist parties, which subordinated all national struggles to Kremlin diplomacy. The expropriations in the Soviet zone led not to workers’ control but to a new bureaucratic ruling class. Therefore, the profit-driven relations that made slave labour “efficient” persisted into the postwar order, at least structurally if not explicitly in name. This continuity is exactly what museums, foundations, and corporate sponsors prefer to keep hidden.
The irony is not subtle. One might note, not without irony, that this very presentation appears to circulate through a foundation bearing the name of a major pharmaceutical conglomerate.” The institutions of memory are funded by the inheritors of the very system they commemorate.
The Function of Official Holocaust Memory
The Wiener Holocaust Library’s exhibition performs an important corrective to the dominant imagery of Holocaust memory. By foregrounding the exploitation of twenty million forced labourers—2.5 million of whom perished—it restores to view a dimension of the Nazi project that the iconography of the gas chambers has long overshadowed. The curators show, with stark clarity, that companies such as I.G. Farben and Krupp “actively ordered human beings as one orders raw material,” consuming labour-power under conditions designed to destroy it. This is not merely historical detail; it reveals the economic logic that underpinned genocide.
However, the exhibition stops precisely where the question becomes politically dangerous. It frames slave labour as a moral drama between “perpetrators and victims,” but refuses to situate this system within the crisis of European capitalism that produced fascism. Slave labour did not emerge from ideological fanaticism in 1942. It was the culmination of a partnership between German big business and the Nazi state, forged in the Depression-era collapse of profitability and the bourgeoisie’s determination to crush the organised working class. The exhibition presents the evidence but withholds the conclusion: that the destruction of millions of human beings was not a deviation from capitalist rationality but its intensification under conditions of dictatorship.
This silence is not accidental. It reflects the broader trajectory of contemporary Holocaust historiography, which has increasingly moralised the past while depoliticising it. Museums, foundations, and commemorative institutions—often funded by the corporate successors of the very firms that profited from slave labour—have constructed a memory culture in which the Holocaust is treated as a metaphysical rupture rather than a historical product of capitalism in crisis. The result is a historiography that can catalogue atrocities with forensic precision but cannot explain why they occurred.
The continuity that official memory cannot name is the most revealing. The industrialists who made slave labour “efficient” were restored to their positions after 1945; their corporations survived intact; their wealth shaped the postwar order. The Western Allies, turning rapidly toward the Cold War, prioritised rehabilitating German capitalism over dismantling the structures that had produced fascism. Stalinism politically disarmed the working class that might have demanded justice. Thus the profit relations that made slave labour rational persisted, structurally if not in name, into the present.
Six decades of memorialising have revealed the moral horror of the camps. However, official memory often conceals the social order behind their emergence. The museum format—focused on morality, tragedy, and devoid of political context—serves this purpose well. It separates the Holocaust from capitalism, turning history into tragedy rather than social critique. It depicts fascism as a moral failure instead of a class-based response. While commemorating victims, it also shields the system that produced them. The Wiener Library exhibit exemplifies this pattern; it is not alone, but representative.
The Wiener exhibition, for all its strengths, remains bound by these constraints. It can show the brutality of exploitation, but not the social order that made exploitation rational. It can commemorate victims, but not indict the system that created them. It can illuminate the past, but not connect it to the continuity of capitalist power. Confronting this truth means understanding that “never again” should go beyond moral remembrance. It requires actively dismantling the social order that enabled Auschwitz, not merely honouring its memory. The link between Nazi slave labour and postwar capitalism is not just a historical detail but a current political reality. The corporations that benefited from the Holocaust continue to exist—some funding museums, others involved in governance, with their wealth influencing today. An exhibition cannot capture this. The fight against fascism and capitalism is intertwined. The critical truth that official history avoids addressing must inform contemporary struggles.
Sources and Bibliography
Archival and Institutional Sources
Wiener Holocaust Library, Nazi Slave Labour: Perpetrators and Victims (Exhibition materials, 2026). Includes curatorial essays, survivor testimonies, corporate documents, and photographic collections relating to forced labour under the Third Reich.
Arolsen Archives – International Centre on Nazi Persecution. Digital collections on forced labourers, concentration camp prisoners, and corporate exploitation during the Nazi period.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Forced labour documentation, including the “Nazi Forced Labour” collection, camp records, and industrial partnerships with the SS.
Fritz Bauer Institute, I.G. Farben and the Buna-Monowitz Concentration Camp (Travelling exhibition, 2025). Detailed documentation of corporate–SS collaboration in the construction and operation of Auschwitz III (Monowitz).
Primary Sources
Nuremberg Military Tribunal, United States v. Krauch et al. (The I.G. Farben Trial), 1947–48. Transcripts and verdicts detailing corporate procurement of slave labour, cost calculations, and managerial correspondence.
Otto Ambros Papers, correspondence with I.G. Farben board members (1941–44). Includes the April 1941 letter noting that “our new friendship with the SS is having a very beneficial effect.”
Krupp Company Records, 1933–45. Orders for camp prisoners, production reports, and internal memoranda on labour shortages and “special labour deployment.”
Eva Clarke and Anka Bergman Testimonies, Wiener Holocaust Library oral history collection. Accounts of forced labour in armaments production and survival of pregnancy under slave labour conditions.
Secondary Literature: Forced Labour and Corporate Complicity
Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The foundational study of the forced labour system, detailing its economic integration.
Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz (Forced Labour under the Swastika) (1999). Quantitative analysis of labour deployment, mortality, and corporate profit structures.
Kim Christian Priemel, The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence (Oxford University Press, 2016). Explores how industrialists avoided accountability and were reintegrated into postwar capitalism.
David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties (2022). Documents the Quandt, Porsche-Piëch, and other dynasties’ use of slave labour and postwar rehabilitation.
Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: I.G. Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Classic study of corporate strategy, profitability crises, and collaboration with the Nazi state.
Holocaust Historiography and Memory Studies
Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023). Argues that Holocaust historiography remains incomplete without integrating structural and political-economic analysis.
Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler (Routledge, 1999). A critical study of the museum form and the commodification of Holocaust memory.
Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014). Explores ideological dimensions but also the limits of culturalist interpretations.
Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford University Press, 2009). Useful for understanding contemporary memory politics and the depoliticisation of historical violence.
Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). On the political uses of Holocaust memory in the postwar order.
Marxist and Political-Economic Analyses
Nick Beams, Imperialism and the Political Economy of the Holocaust (WSWS lecture, 2010). The most comprehensive Marxist analysis of the Holocaust’s economic foundations.
David North, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left (Mehring Books, 2015). On the ideological turn in contemporary historiography and the retreat from class analysis.
Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1930–33). Essential for understanding fascism as a class solution to capitalist crisis.
Clara Weiss, “The Rehabilitation of German Imperialism and the Politics of Holocaust Memory” (WSWS, various articles). On the political uses of Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Europe.
Corporate and Postwar Continuity Studies
Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Details the bank’s financing of Auschwitz and postwar reintegration.
Gerald D. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). On insurance of expropriated Jewish property and corporate continuity.
Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben (1978). A classic exposé of corporate complicity and the failure of postwar justice.
Re: “Are There Still Fascists in the 21st Century?”
To the Editors,
Your recent panel discussion on contemporary fascism highlights an urgent historical and political issue. However, your approach—using a typical taxonomy of debating definitions, checklists, and stylistic “markers”—only obscures the phenomenon you intend to clarify.
This approach is not just insufficient; it reflects a specific ideology. By viewing fascism as a standalone political style disconnected from the class relations that create it, the panel replicates a key flaw of post-war bourgeois historiography. Fascism is treated like a museum specimen, recognized by its appearance, rather than as a tool shaped by the ruling class during times of capitalist crisis.
Leon Trotsky, in 1931, emphasized that any thorough analysis must begin “in a scientific and Marxian manner.” This approach involves focusing not on morphology but on the relationships among the three key classes: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. Trotsky defined fascism as the mobilization of the devastated petty bourgeoisie by finance capital, using it as a weapon against workers’ organizations. He regarded fascism as a consequence of capitalist crises, rather than a particular political style.
Your panel’s approach isolates fascism from its social roots. It considers it an aesthetic, a rhetorical style, or a collection of behaviours. This isn’t a neutral academic stance. Rather, it serves the ideological purpose of historiography: to remove fascism from its political context and link it to the capitalist system that produces it.
Contemporary fascistic politics can’t be fully understood through 1930s frameworks. As various analyses indicate, today’s far-right groups are not grassroots mass movements but are instead shaped by top-down conspiracy, often originating within state institutions, security sectors, and oligarchic networks. The ruling elite has realized it can foster fascistic tendencies without relying on broad-based, spontaneous bourgeois mobilizations. The lack of large rallies doesn’t reduce the threat; rather, it transforms its manifestation.
Your discussion equally overlooks the role of the so-called “democratic” opposition. Recent history shows that the traditional bourgeois democratic parties have not protected democratic rights but have contributed to their decline. The bipartisan growth of state surveillance, militarized policing, emergency measures, and increased executive power reflects a consistent trajectory, not an anomaly. The move toward authoritarianism stems from the fundamental crisis of capitalism, rather than from the personal failings of specific leaders.
That’s why the question “Are there still fascists in the 21st century?” becomes pointless when asked as your panel does. Fascism isn’t about whether current movements look like Mussolini’s rallies or copy the NSDAP’s policies. Instead, it’s defined by its role: employing extra-parliamentary and authoritarian tactics to suppress the working class in contexts where capitalism can no longer sustain democratic systems.
The essential question — often avoided in discussions — is: What social forces are dismantling democratic institutions today, and what should the working class do to fight back? Trotsky’s insights were never purely academic; they served as a strategic call to action in the class struggle. Combating fascism cannot be achieved by backing one bourgeois faction against another. Instead, it demands the independent, international mobilization of the working class.
By framing fascism as just a definitional puzzle, your discussion unintentionally softens public perception of the real threat. This approach mirrors a traditional academic historiography tactic: it actually undermines the public’s understanding of the danger while seeming to analyse it. Fascism isn’t merely about classification; it’s fundamentally about class struggle.
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