Kruse Reviews | The Nazi Menace

— Kruse Reviews by Jens Kruse —

Benjamin Carter Hett’s new book, The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and The Road to War, is in many ways the sequel or companion volume to his 2018 The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, which I reviewed in these pages not quite two years ago.

Now as then Hett, a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, writes about historical periods and events that have been covered by historians before but merit new attention because new sources have become available and because, perhaps more
importantly, any given present will try to understand historical events from its particular perspective and will try to learn lessons for its moment. To illustrate this allow me to quote extensively from Hett’s preface.

There had been a democratic revolution across much of the world just a few years before. Old authoritarian regimes collapsed; hopeful new democracies took their place. The democratic wave originated in central and eastern Europe, and it touched places as far away as East Asia. But now that wave had crested and was receding.

Once again, the trend started in central and eastern Europe, and once again, it had implications around the world. A desperate financial crisis had shaken the foundations of the global economy. Even in the long-established heartlands of democracy, in western Europe and the United States, alarming portents appeared. Many people there, too, seemed drawn to the vigor and confidence of the new dictatorships, even as these regimes vented their hostility and aggression on the democracies. Democratic leaders had to figure out how to confront these threats, with one nervous eye on their own people. And in the dictatorships themselves, there were some who feared where their erratic leaders might be taking them and who tried their best to restrain the wilder bouts of aggression. This may sound like the world today. In fact, it is a description of 1930s. (1)

He continues:

The problems the leaders of the 1930s had to confront were new, but they will seem especially familiar to us –more familiar, perhaps, than would have been the case a few decades ago, when Western democracy seemed not only secure but triumphant, and the threats to it were minimal. What should national security officials do if they think their leader is reckless, dangerous, or incompetent? This was the problem that some German officers and diplomats faced. How should democracies respond to a security threat posed by a vicious regime? How should they think about strategy? What role should technology play in their strategic thinking? For what goals should democracy go to war, and how should it fight? What do you do when your democratically elected politicians serve as mouthpieces for the propaganda of a hostile foreign state? All the democracies faced these problems. (2)

And he sums up:

Above all, the world of the 1930s was wracked by a fundamental conflict: Should the world system be open and international, based on democracy, free trade, and rights for all, anchored in law? Or should the world be organized along racial and national lines, with dominant groups owing nothing to minorities and closing off their economic space as much as possible to the outer world? Today we face this conflict once again. (2)

This book, then, tells the story of how the world’s leaders of the 1930s and early 1940s in Germany and beyond, worked out solutions to these problems step by unanticipated step, “looking for a program,” as Roosevelt put it. Maybe their experiences will help us think about how to tackle our own problems. (3)

Hett tells this story in three parts (‘’Crisis,’’ ‘’Munich,’’ and ‘’War.’’) and 14 chapters. Each chapter begins with a specific scene or vignette before it proceeds to the historical narrative and analysis. One of the pleasures of reading Hett is that, in addition to being a historian steeped in his material, he is an excellent storyteller, that he never loses his reader’s interest and attention. This is both important and admirable, given that his book begins with a list of characters twelve pages long scattered across nine countries: Germany, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, France, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.

The publisher calls Hett’s book a ‘’panoramic narrative of the years leading up to the Second World War — a tale of democratic crisis, racial conflict, and belated recognition of evil, with profound resonance for our own time.’’ Hett’s book does, indeed, present a complex and multifaceted composition,
but one leitmotif is how leaders in democratic nations – Roosevelt, Chamberlain, Churchill – and people within Germany – officers, security officials, diplomats – struggle to contain Hitler. Roosevelt and Churchill eventually succeed; the German officials fail as Hitler replaces more and more of them with loyalists and sycophants and as his victory over France
makes him so powerful and popular that any attempt to contain, let alone control, him becomes impossible. We are all familiar with the catastrophic consequences.

Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (New York: Henry Holt, 2020) can be checked out, by way of curbside pickup, from the Orcas Library or obtained through Darvill’s Bookstore.