A protester in Los Angeles draws a comparison between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. Photo by Getty Images
From his failed Beer Hall putsch in Munich in 1923 to the Third Reich’s downfall 22 years later, Adolf Hitler spewed venom against what he called the “November Criminals” — Marxists and Jews who he claimed were responsible for Imperial Germany’s defeat in November 1918.
Hitler’s assertion, based on a conspiracy theory concocted by Germany’s losing generals and conservative politicians, was ultimately embraced by much of the German populace. In German, this myth is called the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back legend.
Donald Trump has created an American version of the Dolchstosslegende, propagating a myth that the nation was being led to ruination by Joe Biden and the Democrats, prosecutors who go after Trump, judges who rule against him, non-MAGA news media, practitioners of “wokeism,” and elite universities, among others. Trump sometimes lumps together those who oppose him as Communists. Red baiting was good enough for Joe McCarthy, so why not for Donald Trump? All of this is utter nonsense, of course, but this American stabbed-in-the-back lie is at the core of Trump’s assaults on democracy.
To understand how this kind of toxic mythmaking can help lead a nation to catastrophe, it’s useful to examine Hitler’s deployment of the Dolchstosslegende to get Germans to buy into his contention that only he could overcome the economic, political and social instability that had rocked the final years of Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic.
Outside of Hitler’s genocidal hatred of Jews, there seems to have been little that got him more worked up than Germany’s defeat in World War I. In fact, Hitler saw them as connected.
After Germany signed an armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, Germans were besieged by runaway inflation and rampant unemployment. Economic conditions began to improve around 1926, but the worldwide Great Depression brought a return of suffering. Daily political violence added to the turmoil. Coalition governments collapsed. Hitler and the Nazis exploited the situation by claiming that Germany’s World War I loss was caused by leftist politicians and Jews who sold out the country.
In Hitler’s first speech as chancellor on Feb. 10, 1933, he said: “Just as this (Nazi) movement today has been given the responsibility of the leadership of the German Reich, so shall we one day lead this German Reich back to life and to greatness.”
“Devastating conditions have descended upon our Volk,” der Führer said. “For 14 years the parties of disintegration …have seduced and abused the German Volk. For 14 years they wreaked destruction, infiltration and dissolution.”
This Dolchstoss lie was the subject of a 1925 Munich court case that pitted a Socialist newspaper, the Munich Post, against the conservative South German Monthly Magazine, whose editor, Paul Cossmann, published two booklets that vigorously promoted the Stab-in-the-Back myth. The Post accused Cossmann of falsifying history. Cossmann sued the Post for libel. During trial, testimony and historical documents showed that the Stab-in-the-Back claim was a falsification of history. But instead of winning the case, the Munich Post lost. The judge ruled that Cossmann could not be held accountable because he believed what he published, found the newspaper guilty of defamation, and fined it 3,000 Reichsmarks.
As extreme-right passions intensified, the Dolchstosslegende lived on. Hitler repeatedly employed it during his rallies. Once he was in power, Hitler went beyond using the Dolchstosslegende as a rhetorical weapon. He literally tried to erase evidence of Germany’s World War I humiliation. According to historian Despina Stratigakos, in 1940 Hitler ordered the military to destroy World War I memorials in occupied Belgium and France. “The monuments, in Hitler’s eyes, served to defame the army and perpetuate hatred against the nation. Their eradication was thus necessary to restore Germany’s reputation and protect it for posterity,” Stratigakos wrote in a 2019 article for Architect Magazine.
Which brings us to Donald Trump.
The transcript of Trump’s second inaugural address on Jan. 20 reads like a stabbed-in-the-back manifesto.
“For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair,” he said.
In an executive order issued on March 27, and bearing the title “Restoring Truth and Sanity To American History,” Trump made it clear that he sees himself as the ultimate judge of how America’s story can be told. He set his crosshairs on one of the country’s most cherished repositories of history. The Smithsonian Institution, Trump fumed, has “promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
Trump put Vice President JD Vance in charge of “seeking to remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its affiliated facilities, working with Congress to block funding for programs that “degrade shared American values,” and taking other steps to bring the museum into line with Trumpian ideology. Monuments, statues and memorials under the Interior Department’s jurisdiction, Trump decreed, shall not “disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in Colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.”
Compare these words with those of Hitler in his first speech as chancellor: “We desire to bestow once more upon the Volk a genuinely German culture with German art, German architecture, and German music,” and to “evoke deep reverence for the accomplishments of the past, a humble admiration for the great men of German history.”
Trump’s attempts to exercise thought control over Americans expand by the week.
Nearly 400 books on the Holocaust, civil rights, racism and feminism were removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou’s bestselling memoir, is out. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, stays. Book purges are also in the works at the U.S. Air Force Academy and West Point.
We are less than three months into Donald Trump’s second term. There will be many more lies, more scapegoating, more assaults on law firms, on higher education, the free press, on the rule of law, citizens’ rights, and on historical facts. What kind of America will we be living in four years from now? Have we already descended into a form of authoritarianism, or at least its pupal stages?
There are some signs of hope. Some law firms and universities are fighting back against Trump’s efforts to coerce them into bending to his will. Citizens are mobilizing, legions of them taking to the streets in protest of Trump’s power grabs. Courts have been ruling against Trump’s attempts to subvert the law. But none of this seems to faze Trump. And as appeals play out in rulings against him, he keeps using his authoritarian jackhammer against the foundations of American democracy.
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