Echoes of 1930s Europe grow ever louder. We ignore them at our peril

Lenin reputedly said there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen. The past fortnight has been such a period. Half a century from now, it will be dissected by historians as they argue over whether the world wisely learnt the lessons of the past or foolishly repeated past mistakes.

So, what events will those historians be writing about? Will it be US President Donald Trump adopting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talking points about Ukraine and re-enacting the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that divided Poland between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR?

The AfD, now the second-largest party in the German government, is on a similar electoral trajectory to Hitler’s Nazi Party.Credit: AP

Will it be US Vice President J.D. Vance declaring that the threat to Europe is from “the enemy within” in an attempt to forge an international right-wing populist crusade? Will it be Trump’s sacking of the heads of the US armed forces and their likely replacement with military commanders he can trust to obey whatever order he gives, constitutional or otherwise?

Or will it be the leaders of the European democracies gathering in Paris to respond to the potential rupture of NATO, only to display timidity and indecision? These events only happened last week, but they seem to have already passed into history.

Let’s hope the historians aren’t arguing about the other big event that occurred in Germany on Sunday: the neo-Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany party winning more than 20 per cent of the vote and more than 150 seats in the election for the 630-seat Bundestag. Could this be the moment when, in Germany of all places, a far-right party with roots in Nazism established itself as a viable party of government?

If that turns out to be the case, it will prove that we failed to learn history’s most vital lessons.

Many will argue the return to power of the far-right in Germany is a fantasy. They are guilty of the worst of all historical mistakes: complacency. Because the parallels are everywhere.

The AfD is on a similar electoral trajectory to Hitler’s Nazi Party. In 2013, the AfD won just 4.7 per cent party list votes for the Bundestag, not enough to gain a single representative. In 2017, it won 12.6 per cent. It consolidated this with 10.4 per cent in 2021, proving it was no one-election wonder. By more than doubling this to 20.8 per cent last weekend, it has made itself the second-largest party in the German parliament. The mainstream parties have pledged not to enter into government with it, but for how long will they resist playing to the AfD’s more than 10.3 million voters?

In 1928, the Nazis won just 2.6 per cent in the elections to the Reichstag. Two years later, they won 18.25 per cent. And another two years after that, at the height of the Great Depression, they more than doubled that to 37.3 per cent. The mainstream Weimar parties refused to enter into government with them – until they relented and foolishly offered Hitler the chancellorship in January 1933. Months later, Germany was effectively a one-party dictatorship.

I know it’s psychologically difficult for us, having lived through eight decades of comparative peace and democracy, to accept that the disasters of fascism and global war could possibly return, but the future comes with no guarantees – all it provides is lessons.

The warning signs of our generation’s complacency are all too apparent. Again, Germany provides the alarm bells.

After making his speech to the – perhaps ironically named – Munich Security Conference last week, J.D. Vance met with the AfD’s leader to give her party the legitimacy it craved. Just weeks ago, Trump’s offsider, Elon Musk, similarly publicly endorsed the AfD during the German election campaign. These are mistakes that anyone who takes history seriously should never, never contemplate. And yet, they do.

Perhaps the most chilling of all last week’s events was the return to mainstream politics of Nazi symbolism. At CPAC – the Conservative Political Action Conference, which sees itself as the international rallying centre for the populist far-right – Trump’s former campaign manager and White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, repeated the Nazi salute that Musk made on Trump’s inauguration day. And the audience cheered.

Donald Trump at CPAC: “We have escorted the radical-left bureaucrats out of the building and have locked the doors behind them.”Credit: Bloomberg

This tells you something vitally important: these people understand, intimately, the history of Nazi Germany; they know exactly what they are doing; and they have the world’s leaders in the contact lists of their cell phones. They are close to political power. That makes them dangerous. And it turns their historical delusions into possible global tragedy.

This applies especially to Bannon who, famously, on seeing footage of Trump descending the escalator of Trump Tower to announce his bid for the Republican nomination, thought: “That’s Hitler.”

If something can happen once, it can happen again. It may not happen exactly the same way or to the same degree. For example, the Jews now have a homeland, and the biggest threat to peace currently comes from Putin’s Russia not a re-Nazified Germany. But any sort of relapse – even a partial relapse – into the world of 1933 to 1945 would be a calamity.

So what do we want those future historians to write about the worrying events of the past couple of weeks? Not how the populist right in the US and elsewhere morphed successfully into full-blown fascism of the 1930s. Or how in places like Germany, neo-Nazis turned their 20 per cent of the vote into 40 per cent and gained power. Or how giving Ukraine to Russia encouraged Putin to go after the Baltic states, just as giving Czechoslovakia to Germany encouraged Hitler to go after Poland. The story we must give them to tell is how, by thinking historically, and learning the lessons of the past, our statesmen managed to keep our world from disaster.

Dennis Glover is a speechwriter and author of Repeat: A Warning from History, published by Black Inc.

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