Nazis don't 'debate' opponents; they murder them.
'The marketplace of ideas' is no comfort when you're dead
tl;dr
Substack is full of people whose ideas I disagree with: Libertarians who think reservoirs and bridges are BYO, platitude-happy bidness influencers, people who think Donnie Darko was a great movie…the list goes on. I, and the people I care about can peacefully coexist on the same platform with annoying people with bad ideas. That’s how democracy is supposed to work: everybody annoys everybody else, but nobody gangs up to kill the people who annoy them.
Nazis and other violent fascist groups follow a different script. Their ideas are all about worshiping themselves as the best people and killing anybody they consider inferior or impure. And they act on those convictions. If they don’t like you, they’ll kill you first chance they get. So there’s no coexisting with them. Ask Fritz Gerlich.
Nazis disagreed with Fritz Michael Gerlich’s writing, so they murdered him
If you were a literate, politically aware person in Weimar Germany, you probably knew two things about Fritz Michael Gerlich. One: he hated Nazis and Communists, and two: he wore round glasses of the sort that people today associate with Harry Potter. (For the record, Gerlich wore them first.) This second fact matters, and you’ll see why shortly.
Look at Gerlich’s picture. Check out the carefully knotted tie atop a stiff, formal collar. He combed his hair and trimmed his moustache before the photographer snapped this portrait.. Nothing about his appearance screams, “leftist radical!” because he wasn’t. Fritz Gerlich came from a from a bourgeois background, spent most of his career writing for mainstream publications and converted to Catholicism in adulthood. If ever there was an archetypal “reasonable person,” ready to disagree with other reasonable people, Gerlich was it.
And because he was a reasonable person, Gerlich knew unreasonable people when he saw them. In Weimar Germany, those people were Communists, Nazis and the various right-wingers who enabled Nazis. At a time when many leftists were smitten with the Soviet propaganda of Stalin’s USSR and its vision of a ‘worker’s paradise,’ he understood that nobody gets to utopia by way of an authoritarian nightmare.
But it was the Nazis he saw as the real threat to post-WW1 Germany’s shaky democracy. To alert people to the danger from the rising Nazi movement, he started publishing his newspaper, “Der Gerade Weg” (The Straight Path). In it he wrote serious articles about the coming danger—lots of them, but mostly his weapon was ridicule. The cartoon below appeared in Der Gerade Weg in 1932. The caption is, “Hitler, the exalted infant”
But Nazis did not have a sense of humor about themselves, and once they came to power in 1933, they suppressed the free press that allowed other people to make jokes about them. One scathing joke of Gerlich’s wedged like a tick’s head under Hitler’s thin skin. In a satirical photomontage essay titled, “Does Hitler Have Mongol Blood?”
Gerlich observed, as many others before and since have, that Hitler’s physical appearance was very far from the supposed ideal of the Nordic “master race” and emphasized the point with a clumsy photomontage of Hitler’s head on the black groom’s in a Harlem wedding photo. You can find shots of the front page numerous places online, but that kind of visual satire doesn’t age well, even if it pissed off Hitler.
But here’s The Holocaust Chronicle describing it:
Persistently using the Nazis' own imagery against Hitler, Gerlich contended ironically that there could be nothing truly German about Hitler because "blood," according to Nazi ideology, was a matter of spirit as well as the key element in physical life. In Gerlich's view, Hitler's theories and political practices--despotic and corrupt at once--were profoundly at odds with the highest Germanic ideals.
Hitler was not pleased. Soon after Gerlich's article appeared, Nazis attacked the journalist's apartment building. Undaunted, Gerlich used the next week's issue of Der Gerade Weg to press the issue further. On July 24, 1932, he made clear that his lampoon had in no way been an endorsement of the Nazi racism he found so abhorrent.
And what do Nazis do to people they don’t like? If you said, “agree to disagree,” deduct a million points from your score. No, they murder them. Nazis had been waiting to kill Fritz Gerlich for a long time, and come 1933, when the law no longer stood in their way, they acted.
The kidnapping and murder
On March 9, 1933 SA storm troopers invaded Gerlich’s newspaper office, beat the crap out of him and roughly dumped the editor into the back of whichever vehicle they used to transport brutalized captives to their final destination. In time, the regime would refine, scale and systematize the removal and relocation of people they disliked until whole trainloads ran eastward to fill the fingernail-scratched walls of gas chambers of Auschwitz/Birkenau. But on this trip they drove a car or van, with Gerlich its only hostage and suburban Munich’s Dachau Concentration Camp its destination.
And there he languished for a whole brutal year while Hitler and his advisors pondered when and how to dispose of inconvenient fellow Nazis like the SA troopers who kidnapped Gerlich, along with the journalists and political activists they’d imprisoned for saying that Nazis are bad. In the last days of June and first days of July of 1934, they had decided: kill them. So in those early Summer days, they murdered Fritz Gerlich and a whole lot of other people who bothered them.
They cremated Gerlich in one of the corpse ovens just then coming into use in German’s KZs (Konzentrationslager) and packed his ashes into a neat little box for his next of kin, which in this case was his wife, Sophie. And remember the distinctive glasses I spoke of earlier? She got those too, but not in their original condition. The pair that came back to her had jagged, broken lenses inside circular frames, now caked with dried blood.
Because, you know, Nazis.
You cannot debate with people who want to eradicate you, oppress you, harm you, or think you are not quite human. You can debate with people about bridge building.
Bravo for this, Jim. Precisely the piece we need now. Online “debate” has so devalued language that we forget how REAL Fascists work. Substack is wagering the lives of all of its writers--and indeed, their own lives too--that they will be able to “control” Nazi ideology. The same mistake people made in the Weimar Republic.