The Nazis were pretty dumb

Take hope from that

Some years ago I went on Facebook to send a message to an old friend. It took a couple minutes to figure out they’d unfriended me. When I asked them what was up, I was smacked with a tsunami of fury and scorn. Turns out this friend had feelings for me in grad school, feelings I never shared, and was bitter about it.

Initially I was so flustered I foolishly felt bad for them. As our texts continued and the hinge became more unhinged, I remembered the first time they hit on me. A professor had taken our class out to dinner at a restaurant. After almost everyone had left, it was me, this friend and a couple other people. We were all hanging out at the bar when I realized I’d just gotten a text message. I opened it. It was from the girl, the one literally sitting next to me at the bar.

“You should ask [redacted] out,” it said, with her name where “redacted” is.

I had no interest in her romantically. Ever. But even if I had, it would have spontaneously aborted the second I saw her text. You’re literally sitting right next to me and yet you’re too afraid to approach me like an adult? It was such a turn-off, that combo of chutzpah and cowardice.

But it was useful to remember as she kept teeing off on me over text for not wanting her. When she’d first confronted me about it I’d focused on her feelings. Remembering the pathetic parts from early in the story helped keep the ugliness at the end in perspective.

Which brings us to Nazis 2025.

In keeping with an accelerating lack of ingenuity in film, music and humanity, there is today a movement made up of racists, misogynists, bigots and transphobes who look around at a world on fire and can only think to add fuel to it. A number of them, including both the most powerful man in America today and Donald Trump, have decided their role models for leadership are the Nazis, a group of sadists and closet-cases who promised the German people a 1000 years of glory, affluence and world domination. 12 years later millions of Germans were dead, many millions more non-Germans were too, and Germany was bombed out and invaded from the east and the west. The Nazis were so awful the world’s most powerful capitalist and communist nations joined forces to take them down. Germany was conquered, then divided for nearly 50 years.

Decades of TV and film depictions of these losers have generally depicted them as organized, efficient and powerful. And there’s no denying or minimizing the length and breadth of their cruelty — unless you’re a Nazi today, in which case minimizing their crimes is their second-most popular pastime, after denying the Holocaust outright. It’s important to remember why it’s so important to keep these fucks from taking power in the first place — they’re like the world’s worst cockroaches. You let them settle in, it’s an absolute bear to get rid of them.

A lot of beautiful, brave people stood up to them while defending the people the Nazis targeted. A lot of those people died. Don’t underestimate what it means when you see people giving Nazi salutes. Don’t waste a second of your time entertaining the tissue-thin defenses people like Bari Weiss and the Anti-Defamation League float in trying to defend them. If it looks like a Nazi and salutes like a Nazi, it’s a Nazi. To this point, the only thing proven to work on stopping them is fighting back. Fighting hard. So be ready.

But also, take heart: the Nazis were never as on top of things as the talking pictures and silver screen would have you believe. In fact there are literally examples from right after they took power to the very end of their run of an internal dysfunction that after enough time helped topple them from power. Here, then, a brief history of the Nazis shooting themselves in the foot.

• The Night of the Long Knives

As Hitler was rising to power in the 1920s and early 1930s, he ruled over an army of thugs called the SA, also known as the Brownshirts. He co-founded the group with Ernst Rӧhm. Despite the Nazis — many of whom were gay — making homophobia one of the pillars of their hate and it being fairly widely known that Rӧhm was a homosexual (he may have been the only Nazi who was open about it), Hitler treated him as a friend as well as one of his most trusted co-workers. Until he didn’t.

After years of the SA providing paramilitary muscle and murders helping Hitler’s illegitimate rise to power, he finally took official power in 1933. In June of 1934, Hitler ordered the SS, the new paramilitary monsters, to “purge” the entire SA. Rӧhm was imprisoned and shortly after shot to death. The gratitude of kings . . .

It’s useful to remember this story because one thing fascists depend on is getting people to believe in a weak/strong binary. Once that’s your worldview, it becomes easier to fall for propaganda about who “deserves” rights and life and who doesn’t. In the first Trump presidency probably nearly half his staff and hires ended up fired or quitting, often with very bad blood between them. He encouraged his followers to literally hang his last vice-president, and his current administration is a swarming hive of perverts and convicts. Elon Musk doesn’t just hate minorities and trans people, he seems to hate his children and the women who bore them.

These people are only as strong as their local environment. The more they stretch their rule, the more resistance they encounter. Never stop resisting. Start now, however you can, no matter how small it seems. They don’t value their own people. That’s as big a reason as any why they lost before, and will lose again.

• Stalingrad

For the first two years of World War II, the Nazis couldn’t lose. They conquered Poland with help from the Russians, ran roughshod over Belgium, Holland and France, and spent month after month bombing Britain. Their U-boat submarines ruled the waters from the Atlantic all the way to the North Sea. They had their soldiers popping methamphetamines like they were M&Ms, allowing for unprecedented speed and endurance on the battlefield. They seemed unstoppable.

Then they invaded Russia.

Even still, they advanced on three fronts with relative ease, advancing right to the outskirts of Moscow. The invasion began in the summer, but by December winter set in and the Germans had to hold. Once the weather warmed the invasion picked up again, and this time Hitler had a new target in his sights.

The city of Stalingrad sat on the banks of the Volga River. It wasn’t a meaningful military target; of far more strategic value were the vast Russian oil fields south of it, near the Ural Mountains. But when the Nazis were deciding on their course of action for 1942’s operations, Hitler noticed Stalingrad on the map, a city bearing the name of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Hitler’s hated enemy. Hitler siphoned off troops from the forces heading toward the oil fields specifically to conquer Stalingrad. He wanted it for bragging rights. You know how we know it meant so much to him? Because he literally gave a speech pointing out that the city wasn’t important for its name, but it’s strategic significance. You see the same thing from Musk: he pretends he’s a free-speech champion, but if you use the word “cis” on Twitter it’s immediately blocked as hate speech. Poker champs this lot ain’t.

Long story short: Stalingrad became the bloodiest battle in human history; the Germans conquered most of the city but got stuck trying to finish the job as the coldest winter in memory set in; the Russians fought the Nazis maniacally month after month, literally fighting one street, one building, sometimes one room at a time; eventually the Red Army launched a mammoth and completely surprising counter-offensive; the German army begged Hitler to let them retreat, but he refused, insisting they had to stay and fight to the last man, the last bullet (remember this bit; we’ll come back to it later). Ultimately the Germans lost the battle and a half a million soldiers, including almost 100,000 prisoners of war.

Late in the battle, long after any hope of victory, Hitler promoted the general in charge, Friedrich Paulus, to the rank of field marshal. This was on the surface a tremendous honor, but of course nothing is as it appears with Nazis, because the foundation of their belief system and their application of it is bullshit. Hitler promoted Paulus only because to that point no field marshal had ever surrendered, and Hitler assumed by promoting Paulus to such status he wouldn’t, either. Not only did Paulus (eventually, and far too late) surrender, a few years later he was a surprise witness for the prosecution against the Nazis tried at Nuremberg.

Hitler didn’t care about the German army anymore than he had the SA. In Marvel Comics, the mutant superhero group known as the X-Men have two arch-villains who have an essential contrast between them. Magneto is usually the big baddie in that universe, often coming into conflict with the heroes because he refuses to tolerate any human oppression or violence toward mutants. “By any means necessary” would be a fair encapsulation of his ethos. If there is any mutant anywhere in the world being hurt by a human, Magneto will fight for that mutant. He’ll kill if it means keeping them safe.

Apocalypse is different. Although he’s *also* a mutant (it’s complicated), he has an entirely different attitude toward “his” people. To Apocalypse, if a mutant is being victimized by a human, they deserve whatever fate befalls them. Both villains consider mutants superior, but Apocalypse only thinks of them as such in theory; if there’s any evidence that a mutant is coming out on the short end versus a human, Apocalypse thinks that mutant should die. There is to him only the strong and the weak. He doesn’t identify with a people, only with an adjective — strong.

The Nazis build their ideology and appeal to people around the idea that there are “us” — whoever they decide is strong, and pure — and “them” — everybody else. It’s an effective way to recruit certain people and it plays well in speeches, but when push comes to shove they don’t care about each other. Not one bit. And they certainly don’t give a rat’s ass about anyone they consider beneath them — and it’s not just “them” that they consider beneath them. They’re like a snake eating its own tail: Hitler thought everyone was beneath him; his underlings thought he was the top of the pyramid, and everyone else in the Party was beneath them; lower-level officials considered the German public beneath them, etc.

This is already starting to happen under Musk/Trump. Many Republican voters and even politicians are beginning to complain that the rabid dogs they let off the leash aren’t hurting the people they’re supposed to, that they’re turning around and biting them too. Is that an effective way of maintaining power? Consider Hitler was virtually a god in Germany when he took power. A decade later, he was surviving assassination attempts. It doesn’t take long for these people to show you their ass. When you see it, believe them.

• D-Day? Nap time!

When the Allies invaded Normandy in June of 1944, one reason they were able to succeed was they’d put together a fairly incredible misinformation campaign to convince the Nazis the invasion would be at the Pas-de-Calais. German reconnaissance planes flying over southern England reported tons of tanks and planes pointed in that direction, never knowing those were inflatable props. When the Allies landed on the beaches that morning the Nazis were caught completely by surprise.

You’d think the moment they’d been waiting four years for would be kind of a big deal, that Hitler would be alerted to it as soon as humanly possible. You’d be wrong. Hitler was asleep. And nobody woke him. They were afraid to.

By the time Hitler woke up the assault had been going on for hours. There were four panzer (tank) divisions that were only allowed to be commanded by Hitler. If he’d been awake once news of the battle arrived, he could have released those divisions to Normandy, where they would have made things much harder for the Allies. Instead, not only were they stuck waiting for him to wake up, but even after he did Hitler insisted the Normandy invasion was fake news. The real invasion, he insisted, would come at the Pas-de-Calais.

If you lived virtually anywhere in Europe in the spring of 1944, the Nazis rule seemed inevitable, inescapable. By that summer they were in retreat, not only in France but also on the eastern front, where the Russians were pushing them farther and farther west, back toward Germany. We’re in February of 2025. Every day the news, particularly the corporate news that cares more about access and profit than you and me, uncritically report on this and that thing the new Nazis did, with zero care for the hatchet-job they’re doing to infrastructure and human lives. It can seem inevitable, inescapable. That’s how they want you to feel. They’re not that smart. They’re not that powerful. They expect you to play along like you can see the emperor’s new clothes. But they’re naked. They’ve always been naked.

• The Volkssturm

This is the part that’s always stood out to me as the Nazis at their most Nazi-ish. If you’re a prospective Nazi, a sympathizer or a “At least they made the trains run on time!” dweeb, this is the bit to pay attention to.

As the war in Europe neared its end and the Russians neared Berlin, thousands and thousands of Germans committed suicide. There was even an infamous “Last Night” at the Berlin Philharmonic, where the orchestra put on what was expected to be its last show while the Hitler Youth walked around with little baskets passing out cyanide pills to the audience. That’s how terrified the Germans were of the oncoming Russians. That’s what happens when you wage a genocidal war against a people you consider beneath you and it turns out they’re not beneath you and any moment will be on top of you.

Hitler’s bravado appeared unshaken. He declared Berlin a fortress city, meaning no one was to flee, everyone — man, woman, child — was to stay and fight until the last of them was dead. Hitler gave this order from an underground bunker where he could hide, and was certainly not fighting. While the people of Berlin were above ground suffering bombs, bullets and widespread rape, the top Nazis hid under the surface like cockroaches.

One of the last things Hitler did was create the Volkssturm, the kind of word that Musk would think sounds cool but that carries a dark and pathetic history. With the German army on the run on two fronts and losing an estimated 6,000 men per day, there wasn’t a military presence available to wage any kind of adequate defense of Berlin. Even if their army had more soldiers, the Russians had sent the largest invading force ever toward Germany, numbering 2.5 million men. The Nazis lost the war long before their enemies reached the gates of Berlin. That didn’t stop them from making things even worse for their own people.

The Volkssturm was a quickly thrown together domestic “army,” consisting of senior citizens, some women and an awful lot of young boys. They weren’t trained. They weren’t equipped. A lot of them were 13, 14 years old. The last footage ever seen of Hitler is of him talking with these children, smiling and patting them on the head. Then he sent these children to go face the most powerful army on Earth. It didn’t go well.

Not that the top Nazis likely knew that, less likely that they cared. Because starting with Hitler and working down to other paper tigers — Goebbels; Goring; Himmler — the same men who told hundreds of thousands of soldiers at Stalingrad to never retreat, to fight or die, who said the same to the civilians trapped in Berlin as the Russians neared — alllllll the big Nazis committed suicide. All the values they espoused, all the big talk, all the “Germany First!” spiel didn’t mean a thing to them when it was time to put it to the test. They left their supporters to suffer and die and took the easy way out for themselves.

One can only dream of Trump, Musk and others reaching a similar fate. But the parallel of war and suicide doesn’t have to hold for your hope to. Nazis don’t believe in what they say. They do when it’s easy, and comfortable, and it goes unchallenged. That’s why we can never let them feel that way. They’re not normal, they’re not “just another point of view.” They want to hurt us, strip us of our rights and eventually kill us. That is terrifying.

But never forget they’re also dumb, bloated and always care more about their own skin than the flag they draped themselves in. That is why they lose. That is why we’ll win. Can’t say when. Can say will.