Re-reading, actually, the exhaustive history of Hitler’s intelligence operations, Hitler’s Spies: German Military Intelligence In World War II, by David Kahn.
Exhaustive it may be, but Kahn was such a terrific storyteller the book reads like the complex thriller it is.
Since my copy is hard cover, I’m assuming I bought it and first read it in 1978 when it was published. What caused me to take it down (and dust it off, literally — I’m a lousy and lazy housekeeper) from my WWII shelves is what’s going on here, now, in 2025.
While a lot of highly informed and intelligent people were warning us as early as 2017 about the advent of a Hitler-type of fascism, I was sticking to my guns. So to speak. And my guns were saying, no, Trump is not Hitler and his sort of tyranny can’t happen here because we have a history of rejecting tyranny in many forms. (And Trump is stupid.) We were founded in rebellion and I think we’ve never entirely lost that part of the national character, even if it’s declined somewhat into a multifarious kvetch about whatever’s going on.
The criticism of our elected and selected higher-ups from some constituency or another never lets up. We keep our eyes fixed on each and every imperfection and complain about them, loudly. (And Trump is stupid.)
Despite the results of the previous election, I’ve not relinquished my view that we will not drop off the cliff into fascism, and whenever someone I’m talking to says, “This country is stupid,” or “crazy,” I say, “Well, some of the country but not even half of it.” (And Trump is stupid.)
But the speed and irrationality of the acts of destruction continue to be both shocking and bad horror-movie-quality. I’m not going to enumerate the awful things Trump and Elon’s berserkers have done, except to re-emphasize they make no sense in any form of reality. What does make sense is the slew of lawsuits defending our Constitution, and the judges who decide them. The Terrible-Two Trump may make it feel slow, but in reality it’s remarkably fast.
Trump (who is stupid) exists within the chaos of his intimate White House. It’s relentlessly anti-reality and tragi-comically chaotic. To me, it seems psychotic, a bunch of weird people of outstanding mediocrity — and that’s being kind. Plus, it’s relatively small, and shrinking as responsible and law-abiding career civil servants depart.
So if it isn’t Hitlerian fascism, what is it? Pocket-pretend Hitlerian fascism, without the despotic rigor (and instantaneous death penalty) that could make it effective. If any entity drops off the cliff, it’ll be Trump’s lunatics, not this country.
Ergo, I’m re-reading Hitler history to be reminded of how fascism actually worked, and didn’t.
In an early chapter, “The Institutions of Control,” Kahn provides a meticulous description of how Hitler’s showy (the uniforms!), personalized paramilitary forces were invented and who came to power within them. There is a two-page chart entitled “Principal Agencies of German Foreign Intelligence at End of 1943,” squeezed into small print to accomodate the mind-boggling number of branches, and directors of these branches, each of which grew arms and legs. (The branches; the directors presumably already had arms and legs.)
Some of the directors wound up commanding a bunch of offices (like Marco Rubio, maybe?). But at the top, in large bold letters, it reads “ADOLF HITLER, Führer of the Nazi Party and Commander in Chief, Armed Forces.” Just so you don’t wander through the hundreds of power bases and think you’ve gotten to the gist of anything.
Here’s how Kahn summarizes it:
This gigantic, jerry-built apparatus, Germany’s intelligence system, consisting of numerous uncoordinated and often competing mechanisms, sucked up torrents of information–some of it duplicated–through its remote and multiform termini. Each unit refined its information, passing it either through special evaluating agencies, as with the military or through the general bureaucracy, as with the Foreign Office. Then the jealous ministers, the arrogant party officials, the proud warlords of the high commands all scrambled to bring their tidbits to the Führer.
Hitler wanted it that way. The disunity and the rivalries remitted control of the intelligence apparatus to him. And, as the only person with access to all intelligence, he could judge it as he alone saw fit. He would not readily abdicate these powers to anyone else, and he never did. But this afflicted German intelligence with two fatal flaws: inefficiency, and subjugation to a madman.
This does sounds familiar: Inefficiency and subjugation to a madman. (But a stupid and incompetent madman.)
