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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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Today I Learned
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The social democrats were terrified of the workers turning to communism and destroying the Wiemar Republic to build a Leninist dictatorship of the people—a government steeped in authoritarianism and secret police. So they put their weight behind the Nazis in street-battles between brown-shirts and white-shirts. They failed to recognize that by lending legitimacy to any worker movement advocating for authoritarianism and secret police they were signing their death warrant. The Nazis were never that popular but the social democrats authorized the people to tolerate them, even if they didn't like them. The result? Hitler manipulated everyone around him into giving his party more and more power in the name of avoiding Communism. The very first thing he did after becoming the totalitarian authoritarian dictator? Make a pact with Stalin. Again. The Social Democrats created the perfect environment by co-signing Hitler to allow the very thing they were scaredest of to happen. That's why today you see anarcho-communists telling their followers to do things like "don't get involved with Wagner's uprising against Putin. They're not your friends. They're just a slightly different kind of fascist. Best thing we can do is sit back and them bleed eachother."
So that's... One full exploration of how the social democrats enabled Hitler, but there's also another. What did this band of pacifists do as Hitler plunged the world into the most deadly conflict in human history? Did they organize uprisings against him? No. They just kinda planned to wait him out, and remove him through peaceful means. That ship had sailed already but they didn't really get on board with the resistance movements going on within Germany either. If they were in modern times they'd be the people telling people not to march with the Black Lives Matter protests because the best way to get reform is via petition and working within the system. Bear in mind that Hitler completely threw the system in the trash and that the new system in his regime didn't really give room for anyone to resist him through legal means. The social democrats were the leaders that most Germans liked and respected. They were still community leaders, and I think they failed to recognize that a lot of people looked to them for guidance on what to do about Hitler and what they saw was to just go along with it, tolerate all the violence, and hope a better day would come.
If you're interested in an actual good journalist instead of some internet rando talking about all this check out Behind the Bastards: How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible.
That's somewhat misleading, Molotov-Ribbontrop was in 1939, 6 years after Hitler rose to power.
During the 30s, the USSR tried to form an anti-fascist coalition, going so far as to offer to invade with a million men if Britain would join and station men in Poland in the event of a German invasion.
The rest of Europe considered the USSR a bigger threat, and were happy to let the Nazis have Austria and Czechoslovakia if it meant they'd go to war with the USSR and weaken them both. Britain even tried to join the Winter War, but was denied transit by Sweden.
So from Hitler's perspective, he could either invade the USSR and be in a 2-front war as soon as France and UK sensed weakness, or he could sign a non-aggression pact with the most aggressive opposition and have a 1-front war.
From USSR's perspective, they could either sign a non-aggression pact with Germany and force the west into the war, or they could not, and fight Germany and Japan at the same time while the west sits back and watches.
To be fair, everyone that resisted already went to the concentration camps by that time so only the ones who didnt fought were left(you can still blame them) and going publicly against the regime was a death sentence.