–Samuel Clemens

In July 1932, German elections energized the Nazi Party, which won 38 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, the Weimar (German) Republic’s Parliament.

The irony was that the sole reason the Party entered candidates in elections was to give it enough power within the Reichstag to destroy the Reichstag.

The past two days in the House of Representatives have revealed that the spirit of antidemocratic sabotage survives.

July 1932 marked the Party at its electoral peak. Later elections that year revealed that the Nazis were losing popular support.

But it was already too late. Even though they were a minority, the Nazis joined another antidemocratic minority party, the Communists.  [Both the Communists and the Nazis turned to elections after failed armed coups—for the Communists, the Spartacist Revolt in 1919; for the Nazis, Hitler’s failed attempt to topple the Bavarian government in the 1923 “Beer Hall putsch.” I will point out the obvious: January 6 is two days away.]

When the July Reichstag met, with Hermann Goering as Speaker, he immediately called on a Communist deputy, who moved that the Reichstag session be immediately dissolved.

It was. Everyone went home.

Thanks to byzantine plotting and an enfeebled President, Paul von Hindenburg, Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933.

A new Reichstag, purged of all deputies except for National Socialists, would meet twenty times in the next twelve years, mostly as an obedient audience for Hitler’s bombast. It passed a total of four laws.

The emphasis below is mine.

“Our participation in the parliament does not indicate a support, but rather an undermining of the parliamentarian system. It does not indicate that we renounce our anti-parliamentarian attitude, but that we are fighting the enemy with his own weapons and that we are fighting for our National Socialist goal from the parliamentary platform.”  

–Wilhelm Frick, who would become Interior Minister under Hitler. Executed, 1946.


“…[W]e National Socialists never asserted that we represented a democratic point of view, but we have declared openly that we used democratic methods only in order to gain the power and that, after assuming the power, we would deny to our adversaries without any consideration the means which were granted to us…”

–Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister under Hitler. In 1945, as Soviet troops were overrunning Berlin, Goebbels and his wife murdered their six children—five girls and a boy—with cyanide before taking their own lives.


“The parliamentary battle of the NSDAP [Nazi Party] had the single purpose of destroying the parliamentary system from within through its own methods. It was necessary above all to make formal use of the possibilities of the party-state system but to refuse real cooperation and thereby to render the parliamentary system, which is by nature dependent upon the responsible cooperation of the opposition, incapable of action.” 

–Ernst Rudolf Huber, Nazi legal and constitutional scholar. He was eighty-seven when he died in 1990.

Donny: Are these the Nazis, Walter?

Walter:  No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.

–The Big Lebowski