Patrick Bulger reviews ‘Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power’

Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power 
4 stars
Timothy W Ryback
Headline

The story of the collapse of Weimar Germany and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power as chancellor in January 1933 has become a textbook study in political tragedy, its abiding theme being the capture of a parliamentary democracy by a demagogue who claimed to know better than everyone else and who shamelessly subverted the constitution and destroyed it within a year of taking power. A little more than a decade later, Germany was a smouldering ruin.

Though somewhat antiquarian in nature, this mid 20th-century tale remains an enduring cautionary tale of how a charlatan went through the motions of democracy, riding high on the civic freedoms it underwrote, only to undermine that same democracy and promptly extinguish it on coming to power. Sound familiar?

With the passage of time, Hitler has become a caricature of himself, usually described as an “evil genius’’. Part-devil and part-clown, his name is rarely invoked in polite political circles yet his spirit lives on, unspoken, to animate contemporary political actors who understand the power of propaganda backed by the threat of implicit violence.

What also makes the Nazi era a historical lighthouse for generations that followed was that Hitler’s “genius” aside, he was also the virtual patsy for the bourgeois elite of one of the most advanced and sophisticated nations on earth. Europe’s descent to a raw and atavistic survivalism in World War 2 played itself out with the stirring notes of Beethoven as background music. Such was the intimacy of creativity and destruction.

None would say it too loudly (and in some places it’s against the law), but the spirit of Hitler and what he meant in a Europe divided by toxic nationalisms and economic catastrophe lives on. And not only in Europe, either. In the US, former president Donald Trump’s political imagery gives a MAGA-capped nod to the Nazi oeuvre.

Which is a long way of saying that Ryback’s Takeover shines an ever-needed light on a contemporary world plagued by populism. And it is also a very readable and enlightening account of the genesis of this longing for strongman-type solutions.

Civilised society had found its avatar in the Brown Shirts of Hitler’s SA.

In particular, it banishes the myth that Hitler was voted into power by a majority of German voters and lays bare the scheming and the intrigue that saw him becoming chancellor on the misguided hope that he could somehow be “tamed” in office. Ryback artfully dissects how the vested interests of business, the military, the press, high society and the masses were able to identify him as the answer to their own particular problems, almost regardless of how sheer logic and past experience of his shameless duplicity should have informed otherwise.

For the history lover, Ryback’s addition to the already-bulging library of works detailing the life of the failed artist from Austria offers an unusual twist to the well-trodden garden path. Rather than the role played by Hitler, the book chronicles and throws light on the other essential dramatis personae in the sad tableau that destroyed the constitutional Weimar Republic with hardly a thought for what might replace it.

Ryback’s painstaking research and sourcing and his accessible writing and ordering take one inside the cauldron of intrigue and driven ambition, the vanities and the egos, and the hubris and self-serving fallacies that drove the men (and some women too) as they attempted to promote, or resist, Hitler’s final steps into the chancellorship.

The spotlight on the interactions that brought Hitler to power provides a compelling narrative of how an elite that pulls the strings behind the scenes can be persuaded against all available proof to change their minds if they come to believe it will best protect their interests. Only in that way could Hitler go from declasse rabble-rouser to being described as “a modest, orderly man who only wants what is best for Germany”. None would admit their emperor was naked.

Against the backdrop of high-society intrigue, Germany was emerging from the Great Crash of 1929 as a society divided against itself, with mass unemployment and rival right- and left-wing armies easily more powerful than the 100,000 troops the German army was limited to in terms of the Treaty of Versailles signed at the end of World War 1. No single party could muster a majority in the Reichstag, or parliament, with Hitler’s Nazis well short of a 50% majority. Society and politics were gridlocked, insurrection was in the air.

Aided by a Communist Party that followed Moscow’s line to wage war first and foremost on Social Democrats, (thus prohibiting a Reichstag majority that could have fortified democracy) and animated by his Lenin-like refusal to countenance sharing power, Hitler’s SA Brown Shirts, numbering some 400,000, were the hammer held over all the talks about coalitions and positions.

One cannot read Ryback’s book without reflecting on the crossroads that so much of the world is at today, with many countries trying to sustain electoral democracies that offer their people hope with the prospect of incremental progress yet are cursed with destructive politicians who offer radical solutions to salve historical grievances.

Ryback’s chronicling of his betrayal should be required reading for all those who would confuse democratic tolerance for weakness and incertitude of principle. The spirit of Hitler stalks the world yet, and as this book illustrates, we should be wary of trading hard-fought democratic gains for the promise of a shortcut to political nirvana.

Sometimes, democracies have to act tough too.