Am Anfang enden, "To end at the beginning"

A raft of preventable events resulted in Adolf Hitler becoming Germany's improbable chancellor on 30 January 1933. He came from a "narrow and parochial existence," observed one historian; there was "little to arouse one's interest in the man himself, indeed he [was] almost totally submerged in ... his political movement."

Publicly, Hitler would metamorphose into the movement's invigoration, a thundering geyser of pandering grievances and rhetorical violence that many, though not a majority, of working- and middle-class Germans found charismatically appealing. In private, national dignitaries (including the president who appointed him) found Hitler unimpressive, hence a manageable demagogue; or, the pressures of office would tame him.

Yet on 30 January 1933, the raft of preventable events also resulted in the Weimar Republic becoming a dead letter — not the next day, not in February, and neither did the German republic die from the historically infamous Enabling Act of March. Infamy landed on 30 January and promptly croaked democracy. Only the mere formalities of Weimar's funeral remained to be had.

The fatherland, Hitler had shrieked with relentless ferocity, was in terrible straits. Crime, or rather crimes, against the virtuous people of Germany were happening everywhere, instigated and carried out by foreign vermin. And sure enough, a criminal instance of Hitlerian convenience soon occurred: a Dutch communist torched the Reichstag building.

Thereupon opportunity, as they say, knocked. Not one to pass up the good fortune of an incendiary incident, the vigilant chancellor portrayed the arsonist's deed as signaling a veritable mass invasion of malicious alien intent, quite aside from the perils of enemies within. What we have here, proclaimed Hitler, is a national emergency. And national emergencies demand emergency mandates.

In the Reichstag Fire Decree of February (signed by Germany's not-for-long still-breathing president, Paul von Hindenburg), Hitler got a bundle of them, one of which dovetailed perfectly with his preexisting designs, clinched on the 30th of the preceding month — and he knew it. The executive order abolished Weimar's civil liberties of free speech, a free press, the right to assemble and protest. Of greatest, immediate value, it terminated due process.

With that — the inevitable death of habeas corpus — the high priests of national socialism belatedly performed last rites over the republic's already decayed corpse. This final formality manifested in the arrest and "detention" of Hitler's political opponents, chiefly communists — thousands of them — and pointedly, Communist Party delegates to the Reichstag.

Their elimination was needed for the rubber-stamping of official dictatorship, the aforementioned Enabling Act. The Nazi delegates formally titled their big beautiful bill the "Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich." It breezed through parliament on the 23rd of March, Hitler having had the foresight to open the first concentration camp, Dachau, on the 22nd of March. There, more than 100 detained Communist pols and Social Democrats were silenced. To none of this did Germany's Supreme Court object.

On 25 August 2025, journalist-historian Garrett Graff published an online piece with this opening: "The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here" (emphasis mine).

The journalist's imagination squares with an aphorism known as Dornbusch's Law: "The crisis takes longer to happen than you can possibly imagine, then happens quicker than you can possibly imagine." Rüdiger Dornbusch tossed that out extemporaneously in a 1997 interview about his field of economics, though it's now applied to others. Hemingway's similar quip in The Sun Also Rises, about how bankruptcy happens, also comes to mind: "Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."

Graff, having noted America's faster-than-he-imagined fascist topple, goes on to remark that "Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree."

On the second point, he's spot on; but he wrongly imagined that American democracy's conversion to fascism seemed impossibly fast — for here, as in Germany on 30 January 1933, there was no delicate tipping, no gradual-then-sudden angling into an authoritarian state. That occurred abruptly on 5 November 2024, and again, as in Germany, everything else from there on out has been just a matter of degree.   

When Adolf Hitler, a petty, parochial little man, was made chancellor, Germany's fate was sealed, and when petty, parochial Donald Trump was elected, so too was America's fate.

Das Ende.

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* This piece is cross-posted at Substack. Subscribe to be notified of new posts.