( Detailed Political Quizzes ) – As comparisons between contemporary American politics and the rise of the Nazi Party are frequently invoked in the media, it’s crucial to draw one specific lesson from the history of Weimar Germany, the democratic state that existed from 1918 to 1933. The rise of Hitler and the Nazis was not the result of Weimar’s failure to punish hate speech. Instead, it was the futile attempt to suppress such speech while not acting effectively to curb political violence that allowed the Nazis to rise and gain power.
During the Nazis’ rise, there were laws in place that criminalized hate speech. In the fifteen years leading up to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933, for example, more than 200 legal prosecutions were initiated in response to antisemitic speech and hundreds of Nazi-affiliated newspapers were shut down. Hitler himself was banned from speaking in several German states from 1925 to 1927, while prominent Nazi figures were sentenced to prison.
Rather than curbing the spread of Nazi antisemitic ideology, legal prosecutions of Nazis undermined the credibility of Weimar leaders and inadvertently aided the Nazi movement by providing a platform for their racist and fascist beliefs. The Nazis, for instance, claimed they were being persecuted for exposing an international conspiracy aimed at oppressing “true” Germans. Given that the core of Nazi ideology, as articulated by Hitler in his 1925 autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, centered on a supposed conspiracy between Jews and their government sympathizers to politically disenfranchise Aryan Germans, it’s unsurprising that the Nazis were able to portray government censorship as proof that powerful forces were aligned against them.
The issue with Germany’s response to the rise of Nazism, therefore, was not a failure to penalize hate speech, but rather the inadequate punishment of Nazi violence. This violence allowed the Nazis to suppress the rights of anti-Nazis, Jews, and other targeted groups. Acts of political violence committed by Nazis were either under-punished or went unpunished, often due to the sympathetic attitudes of judges and juries—sympathy that was not extended to their leftist or communist counterparts. For instance, Hitler, after leading an attempted coup d’état in 1923, should, by the legal standards of the time, have faced execution, life imprisonment, or at the very least, a permanent ban from holding public office. However, due to the leniency of a sympathetic judge, he was sentenced to only five years in prison. Thus, the clearest way to have prevented the rise of the Nazi party would have been the proportionate prosecution of its political violence.
Food Queues Weimar Republic 1918 Hanover. Public Domain.
During the presidential elections of March and April 1932, Hitler’s paramilitary Brownshirts formed “emergency squads” to intimidate voters. On the night of the Reichstag election on July 31, 1932, Brownshirts unleashed a wave of violence, including the murders of local officials and communist politicians. When five Brownshirts were sentenced to death for these murders, Hitler condemned the sentences as “a most outrageous blood verdict” and declared that “from now on, your freedom is a question of honor for all of us, and to fight against the government which made possible such a verdict is our duty.” These words bear a disturbing resemblance to a statement made by Donald Trump during a January 2024 speech, where he defended his supporters’ actions during the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack — an attack that included assaulting police officers and attempting to disrupt the lawful transfer of power to Joe Biden. Trump claimed his supporters had acted “peacefully and patriotically” — despite the attack resulting in more than 1,200 criminal charges, with nearly 900 individuals pleading guilty or being convicted. Referring to those serving sentences, Trump said, “Some people call them prisoners, I call them hostages,” and promised to pardon them if re-elected. Indeed, on January 6, 2025, as Trump began his second term, he fulfilled his promise. (The FBI closely monitored extremist, anti-democratic organizations linked to some of these individuals during the Biden presidency. The question remains whether such vigilance will continue under Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, a known loyalist.)
The fear of political violence likely influenced some Republicans to refrain from voting to convict Trump during his impeachment trials. Numerous journalists have reported that Republican lawmakers privately express concern that Trump might incite his MAGA supporters to engage in acts of political violence against them if they fail to support him. (In 2016, the Capitol Police recorded fewer than 900 threats against members of Congress, but after Trump took office in 2017, that number more than quadrupled. The threats continued to rise throughout his presidency, reaching a peak of 9,700 in 2021.) Former Senator Mitt Romney hired personal security for himself and his family after receiving threats following his vote to remove Trump from office for his role in the January 6 Capitol attack. Romney revealed to his biographer that during Trump’s impeachment, a member of the Republican Senate leadership had initially leaned toward voting to convict Trump. However, after other senators expressed concerns for their personal safety and that of their families, the senator ultimately chose to acquit. Similarly, former Republican Representative Liz Cheney disclosed to CNN that several House Republicans confided in her their fears for their own security and, in some cases, for their lives. Former Republican Representative Peter Meijer also heard similar concerns from his colleagues. Additionally, Senator Thom Tillis reportedly said that the FBI had warned him about “credible death threats” when he was contemplating voting against Pete Hegseth’s 2025 nomination for Secretary of Defense. Tillis eventually voted in favor of Hegseth’s confirmation.
The lesson of Weimar Germany is that a free society cannot endure if it fails to respond decisively to political violence. The normalization of such violence undermines the foundations of democracy by eroding the space for reasonable debate and the peaceful transfer of power. Imagine the implications if a president were to pardon violent rioters who attempted to thwart the peaceful transfer of power … a troubling thought.
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References for this piece are provided at the section titled “Weimar’s Lesson” at:
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