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80 Years Ago Today: The Nazis Surrender
80 years ago today: VE Day. Victory in Europe: what a great birthday present for Harry Truman!
It seems like it was only a week ago when we observed that it was the 80th anniversary of Adolph Hitler’s death by suicide. That’s because it WAS only a week ago (okay nine days) that we did that. Nazi Germany only outlasted the death of the Fuhrer by nine days.
This wasn’t just because the country had been devastated militarily, at least not directly. It’s because the German dictatorship was a cult of personality. Like a cancer, Hitler had replaced Germany’s preexisting structure of law, government, and social organization with an improvised puppet show depending on his personal direction. And there was no mechanism to continue without him.
The leadership of the Nazi Party (and hence the German nation) was a den of treacherous back-stabbing snakes, so there could never have been any cooperation about what a succession might look like, only underhanded knavery. Each official who might have laid some claim to being second in command to Hitler was cancelled in some nasty way. Ernst Rohm, head of the SA, was killed in a purge in 1934. The officialDeputy Fuhrer Rudolph Hess undertook a peace mission on his own initiative in 1941, was imprisoned by the British, then disowned by Hitler as a traitor. Herrman Goering was forced to resign after asking permission to take the reigns of leadership as the allies neared Berlin in 1945. Heinrich Himmler was fired next after he planned to broker a separate peace with the British. Joseph Goebbels served as Chancellor for a day but chose to follow his Fuhrer to Valhalla hours later. Martin Boorman, another natural successor, also gambled on staying by Hitler’s side as long as possible, resulting in his own death the day after that. This left someone most people in the US have never heard of to serve as Germany’s new leader: Navy Admiral Karl Doenitz. Doenitz became titular ruler of the Third Reich for a few weeks in May 1945, in what was rather hilariously called “the Flensburg Government”. It sounds like a comedy sketch but its quite real. “The Flensburg Government”, ruled by “Donuts” — I mean, Doenitz. Technically, it lasted until June 5, but for all practical purposes it was finished by May 23.
If your entire system depends on A) fear and B) summoning the will to be awful, its days are numbered from the moment of its inception. The death of such a nation is foreordained by its very nature. The means by which a nation survives the whims of whatever lunatic is at the helm is constitutional government, the very thing that America’s present President is undermining and dismantling as we write this. The fact that he is able to do so reveals the fatal loopholes and weaknesses that were baked into our Constitution, but the parts that were good and that have worked so well and for so long were the hard work of this country’s best minds over centuries. Such things, once broken, are not easy to replace.
This is a good time to recall how vigorously the Allies strove to stifle the IDEOLOGY of Nazism in the wake of the Second World War, at the Nuremburg trials and elsewhere. They didn’t just punish the leaders and move on. They took care that the new Germany would have a constitution that guaranteed liberty to its citizens, and forbade former Nazis from serving in positions of responsibility in future. Somehow, some viper eggs survived. But we licked ’em before. We’ll lick ’em again.
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