By Charles Jay for Community Contributors Team
Community / Daily Kos
Donald Trump’s first wife Ivana said her ex-husband kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches, titled “The New Order,” by his bedside. It might be the one book that he actually carefully read because our wannabe dictator keeps ripping pages from Hitler’s playbook as he campaigns to return to the White House.
Aided by his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, Hitler worked to turn jailed and slain Nazi thugs into martyrs during his rise to power in the decade after his failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch (for which Hitler spent only nine months in prison, despite being convicted of treason).
At the start of last Saturday’s Trump rally in Dayton, Ohio, a voice over the loudspeaker told the crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages.” Trump stood and saluted during the recording of what has become the MAGA anthem, “Justice For All.” It’s an altered version of “The Star Spangled Banner” performed by the so-called J6 Choir—insurrectionists held in a D.C. jail awaiting trial on felony charges. Overlaid on their song is Trump reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance.”
The Nazis had a national anthem attributed to the martyrs to their cause as well.
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A Just Security analysis showed that most of the Jan. 6 inmates held in the D.C. jail around the time the recording was made in early 2023 were accused of assaulting law enforcement officers during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Trump began his speech by pledging to pardon those imprisoned for
Jan. 6 crimes on his first day in office, praising them as “unbelievable
patriots.” These were the people whom Trump inspired to storm the
Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential
election.
On Substack, in an article about Trump’s Dayton speech, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder likened what Trump did in celebrating his fascist movement’s “martyrs” to what Goebbels and Hitler did in the decade between the Nazis’ failed 1923 coup and their coming to power in 1933. And he linked the J6 Choir’s anthem to the “Horst Wessel Song,” which became the co-national anthem of Nazi Germany along with “Deutschland uber Alles.”
Snyder wrote:
The cult of criminals as martyrs also suggests a historical context: the fascist politics of violence. Before Hitler came to power, Goebbels worked hard to find a violent Nazi who could be portrayed as a victim of the far left. He eventually found a dubious character called Horst Wessel, who became the subject of the Nazis' main song. Trump has made an eerily similar move, turning his coup criminals into musicians of martyrdom.
The fascist-style martyrdom cult justifies violence, in two ways. It makes a hero of criminals, thereby making criminality exemplary. And it establishes prior innocence -- we suffered first, and therefore anything we do to make others suffer will always be justified. The Nazis sang their Horst Wessel Song as they conquered countries and killed millions.
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch made a similar connection. He wrote, “Where did Trump learn to turn thugs into heroic martyrs? Try 1930s Germany.” And Bunch wondered just how much Trump and his team “are modeling the authoritarian rise of the Nazis ... either consciously or unconsciously.”
In the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, 16 Nazis were killed along with four Bavarian police officers. The History.com website described how the deaths of these early Nazis were turned into “a propaganda victory” for the fascist movement.
The men became martyrs, remembered in the foreword to “Mein Kampf” and entombed in two “temples of honor” in downtown Munich. Hitler held an elaborate march every year on the anniversary of the putsch, retracing the route from the Bürgerbräukeller to the spot where the shots had been fired in 1923. A flag that had been stained with blood from the putsch became a symbol of Nazi ideology.
Trump has hailed his own Jan. 6 “martyr”—Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door that led into the Speaker’s Lobby outside the House chamber at the head of a mob of Trump supporters.
The officer who shot her, Lt. Michael Byrd, told NBC News that he “saved countless lives” that day because about 60 to 80 House members and staffers were holed up inside the chamber. Byrd, who is Black, said he received numerous death threats and racist attacks after his name was leaked by right-wing websites.
Just months after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Trump was already turning Babbitt into a martyr for the MAGA cause. In a video filmed for her birthday, Trump said, “To Ashli’s family and friends, please know that her memory will live on in our hearts for all time. … There was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashli."
A 2021 Salon story described Babbitt as a 21st century version of Horst Wessel. Wessel was a member of the paramilitary SA (Storm Troopers) who engaged in violent street brawls with the Nazis’ leftist opponents. Salon wrote that Wessel “was perhaps more like a member of the contemporary Proud Boys or Oath Keepers.”
In 1930, the 22-year-old Wessel was shot and mortally wounded by two Communists during a dispute over his eviction from a Berlin apartment. Goebbels visited him in the hospital before he died and decided to turn Wessel into the new Nazi “martyr.”
Goebbels himself described Wessel as a ”Christ-like” figure in his eulogy at a public funeral. Just months before his death, Wessel had written the lyrics to a marching fight song, setting them to an old German folk melody. The “Horst Wessel Lied” first gained popularity when it was sung by a choir of Storm Troopers at Wessel’s funeral, and in 1931 it became the official anthem of the Nazi Party.
In 1934, after Hitler had consolidated his power to become Germany’s dictator, legendary director Leni Riefenstahl filmed the massive Nazi rally in Nuremberg for her documentary, “Triumph of the Will.” An orchestral arrangement of the “Horst Wessel Song” is heard at the beginning of the film as Hitler’s plane flies through the clouds to land in Nuremberg, and the film ends with the Nazi leaders and the massive crowd giving the Nazi salute as they sing the song to show their solidarity with their Fuhrer. It’s quite chilling.
New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarian leaders, drew comparisons on Substack between the 1934 Nuremberg Nazi rally depicted in “Triumph of the Will” and Trump’s March 2023 rally in Waco, Texas, that kicked off his 2024 presidential campaign. Waco was also the site of the Branch Davidian religious sect's deadly 1993 showdown with federal authorities.
Ben-Ghiat said “the stagecraft and rituals” seen at Trump’s rally continue the Fascist past.” And she wrote that the Nuremberg rally “enshrined victimhood and mourning into regime ritual and justified Nazi violence as national defense.” Ben-Ghiat wrote:
Fascism evolved out of paramilitary environments, with a cult leader who orchestrated violence. Once in power, Fascists used propaganda to change the public's perception of violence, associating it with patriotism and national defense against internal and external enemies. Rallies were crucial to that end. …
In Nazi Germany, a favorite rally ritual was singing the "Horst Wessel Song," which became the co-national anthem of Nazi Germany. In Waco, crowds sang along with a recording of "Justice for All," performed by the J6 Prison Choir. …
The Waco rally channels America's extremist past, but it also heralds America's Fascist future if Trump returns to the White House in 2024.
And finally there is actually an American version of the “Horst Wessel Song.” It was created in the 1930s by a white supremacist, pro-Nazi group known as the Silver Legion, “a Christian militia dedicated to the to the spiritual and political renewal of the United States,” according to a 2018 article in Smithsonian Magazine. The group called for re-enslaving African Americans and excluding Jews from the country.
It was founded in Asheville, North Carolina, by William Dudley Pelley, a novelist and former Hollywood screenwriter, who envisioned himself as the future dictator of the U.S. The group, which became known as the Silver Shirts because of their uniforms, had about 15,000 members at its peak. A congressional committee would later characterize the Silver Shirts as “probably the largest, best financed and best publicized” Nazi copycats in the United States.
After the U.S. entered World War II, Pelley was convicted of publishing a seditious magazine and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He secured an early release from prison in 1950.
The Smithsonian cited the work of Fresno State University historian Bradley W. Hart, who wrote a book,” Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States.” The Smithsonian wrote:
Hart believes that the United States was lucky that its political parties at the time policed the extremists within their ranks and that the advent of war more or less shut down any pro-Hitler rhetoric, but that wasn’t inevitable. If the Depression had dragged on or if the United States sat out the war, the extremism bubbling beneath the surface may have become more organized and powerful. ...
“We need to take a new perspective on this period. It was much more ideologically divided than we remember,” says Hart. “The outcome that happened in 1945 was in no way preordained. Had Pearl Harbor not happened, [American Nazism] would have gone on for quite some time. We have to realize we’re not immune to political extremism or extremist pressure groups.”
Hart was right about that. It can happen here.
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