80 years since VE Day in Europe: what lessons must we learn about how a democratic country turns into a Nazi totalitarian state?

Next week marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day in Europe and the end of Second World War, at least in Europe. The war in Asia continued until the following September, when Japan, like Nazi Germany in May 1945, surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The TV networks will no doubt mark the occasion by showing old newsreels of cheering, flag-waving crowds. In the UK, Churchill was mobbed in The Mall as he tried to move from Westminster to Buckingham Palace. Across liberated Europe, towns and villages were festooned with flags and were the scene of spontaneous street parties, although the footage shows mainly smiling women and children; the menfolk were still on occupation duty abroad or still fighting in the Asia Pacific region. They would not return in many cases until a year later. The newsreel shows on nearly all faces a massive sense of relief that the most destructive war in human history (claiming at least 50mn civilian and military lives) was finally at an end. The ordeal was over and life and families could return to normal.

This, in reality, was true for some but not for millions of others. Across Europe, many people, deprived of food and shelter, had been displaced by the war and living for years in squalid camps run by the UN and national relief agencies. Last year, I interviewed the former Latvian president Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga. Her family left Latvia in 1944 but were not finally settled in their new home in Canada, via periods of camp life in Germany, Denmark and Morocco, until 1955. That was the year also when the Soviet Union allowed hundreds of thousands of German soldiers, captured by the Red Army as it advanced across Eastern Europe, to return home. Millions of German civilians on carts and horseback had meanwhile fled their villages in east Prussia to escape rape and pillage by Stalin’s Red Army and reach the Allied lines in western Germany. Jews who survived the Holocaust and wanted to move to the Holy Land were stuck in transit camps in southern Europe for years before they could do so. As a result of wartime suffering and deprivation and bureaucratic delays in resettlement, hundreds of thousands died even after Hitler put a bullet through his head in his Berlin bunker on 30 April and Germany surrendered a few days later. And the fighting also continued in certain parts of Europe after the guns of the allies and the Axis forces fell silent on 8 May. Yugoslav leader Tito continued to brutally crush his royalist opponents until 1948 and small groups of resisters harassed the Soviet occupation troops from deep in the forests of the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine. Indeed, the last Japanese soldier hiding out in the jungle of the Philippines for 29 years did not surrender until 1974. The UK sent Soviet prisoners of war back to the Soviet Union where Stalin immediately executed them, as he also eliminated real or imagined political opponents throughout the territories occupied by his Red Army. All this underscores the truly catastrophic human consequences of Hitler’s decision to start the Second World War by attacking Poland on 1 September 1939. Even though the human pain and suffering progressively faded, as survivors died and the world moved on to other challenges and preoccupations, the political consequences of the Second World War, in terms of the division of Europe and the repression of freedom in central and eastern Europe under communism, lived on for another 45 years. Machiavelli once pointed out that it is easier to start a war than to end it, and in terms of long-term consequences, the Second World War arguably did not end until Germany was reunited and Soviet troops left eastern Europe in 1990.

The Second World War was such a tragedy affecting the lives of so many (and across the globe) that any significant anniversary, especially the 80th anniversary of VE Day, must be the occasion to ask once more the eternal and inescapable question: how could a calamity on this scale have possibly happened? And is this just history fading ever deeper into the unfathomable darkness of the past or something with urgent lessons for all of us living today? The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, said “that which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered”. This is not the place to debate the causes of the Second World War. Although they have inspired fewer books and controversies than the more complex and ambiguous circumstances leading to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, historians still argue whether all the responsibility can be laid at the door of Adolf Hitler and his expansionist ambitions alone. But what is incontestable is that the collapse of democracy in Germany and the transformation of the country into a totalitarian one-party state after 1933 certainly removed all the usual constitutional constraints and checks and balances on the ability of a single leader to do whatever he wanted, and to make not only the leadership of the Nazi Party but also millions of ordinary Germans support him enthusiastically in this endeavour to upend the European order. Hitler set out to “make Germany great again” by righting all the wrongs that he believed other countries had unfairly inflicted on it. But his solution for doing this was to impose German domination on the rest of Europe and make the subjugated countries serve Germany’s economic interests. How did Hitler pull it off? By creating a German state and society that was willing and able to go to such extremes. What Hitler wanted to do was not to make Germans tremble in fear and do his bidding only under considerable duress, but to induce them to support him and participate in his murderous enterprise willingly. Six things in particular need to be noted in this connection as other aspiring rabble-rousers, populists and wannabe autocrats nearly a century later are fond of using them too.

First, conspiracy theories. Hitler and German nationalists more generally liked to present themselves as the victims of foreign and domestic plots and conspiracies. The German army had not been defeated in the First World War, but had been “stabbed in the back” by unpatriotic Social Democrat politicians. Thus, the military bore no responsibility for the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, which had treated Germany unfairly and taken away 13% of its territory. Germany had the right to bring together all ethnic Germans in Europe within a single, all-powerful Reich. But international capitalism in the hands of the Jews had conspired to bring down the German economy by starving it of capital. Thus, the Jews had to be removed from German society and economic life. The Jews were the enemies, and it was justifiable to exterminate one’s enemies. The only way the German nation could survive was by binding all Germans of pure blood into an ethnically-based Volksgemeinschaft from which corrupting foreign influences would be excluded. These were, of course, rather extreme forms of conspiracy theory, but the methods are still in use by today’s generation of autocrats and aspiring dictators. As when Trump in the United States pretends that the traditional media are the purveyors of “fake news” or top-notch universities like Harvard or Columbia are hotbeds of antisemitism and extreme-left radicalism. Or when US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, claims that the problems of the US military are caused by women and transgender recruits. Or when Trump blames the loss of jobs in coal mining or steel making on unfair foreign trade policies, when in reality the same shift in employment patterns has occurred globally and is driven by technological change and climate adaptation policies. But we do not need to go as far as the US to find the political exploitation of conspiracy theories. In Hungary, Victor Orbán constantly claims that the political opposition is the puppet of foreign powers just as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye blames anti-government demonstrations on foreign agents or the secretive Gülen religious movement. Naturally, all problems are blamed on previous governments. In Hitler’s case, the Weimar Republic. In Trump’s case, Ukraine is problematic because it is “Biden’s War”. Conspiracy theories are a way of bending every inconvenient fact to a leader’s own prejudices or preconceived vision of the world. They are also a way of denying facts by pretending that there are alternative facts or that the truth can never be proven. Social media today has made it much easier to create and spread lies and conspiracy theories of almost any kind. Do you really believe these pictures are true? How do you know that Napoleon was not an extraterrestrial or that this illegal immigrant deported from the US was not a member of a violent gang? Show me the proof. The truth is what I say it is. To acknowledge reality and to stop lying is to reveal the essential emptiness at the heart of governments where gaining and keeping power is the only objective.

The second device is to create a binary division of society into “us and them” or friend and foe. Those who are not with us are therefore against us. In Nazi Germany, the “them” were not only Jews but also communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, independent journalists and critics of the regime, as well as the Roma people and the mentally infirm. In 1933 alone, over 200,000 alleged regime opponents were arrested and interrogated, and well before the outbreak of the Second World War, around 30,000 people were permanently incarcerated in harsh labour camps such as Dachau in Bavaria. Anyone not parroting Nazi propaganda and the official government line was suspect and could be denounced to the police. “The only private citizen in Germany”, famously declared SS intelligence chief, Reinhard Heydrich, “is a person who is asleep”. Again, the Nazis provided an extreme example of ‘us and them’, but using this binary remains the stock in trade of autocracies. Today the ‘them’ are frequently illegal migrants now being deported from the US without due legal process and the right to have their cases heard. It is also the liberal establishment portrayed as selfishly elitist and out of touch with the true-blooded average American voter. Even Republicans who dare to vote with Democrats or join bipartisan committees. And the ‘them’ are the traditional media who are excluded from White House press briefings to be replaced by Trump-supporting social media platforms, operating with ideology and not accurate and reliable news reporting. In castigating a Trump-appointed Pentagon official who had had the temerity to expose the chaos and mismanagement under Pete Hegseth (hardly a surprise to anyone), Vice President JD Vance said that he was being excluded from the “movement” as if this was tantamount to an excommunication. Drawing a clear dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is the way to portray any criticism as disloyal, unpatriotic and part of a political game. Therefore, biased and unjustified. It turns all issues into loyalty tests and political fights where ‘winning’ and demonstrating strength come before reasoned debate and exploring the merits of the argument. It helps to demonise your adversaries and pretend that their motives for opposing you are not honourable and part of the democratic process but self-serving and disingenuous. Over time, ‘us and them’ persuades many to practice self-censorship and to keep their heads down for fear of reprisals.

Corrupting youth was another way the Nazis pushed people into their movement and radicalised them to do (or accept) extreme things. The Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls are noteworthy in this respect. They combined indoctrination and peer pressure with a sense of adventure and excitement, taking young people outside the influence and authority of their parents and educators and giving them a new group identity. To some degree, it isolated young people in a bubble isolated from the rest of society, particularly minorities like the Jews who were not allowed to join. The Hitler Youth movement also taught basic military skills to prepare for future conscription and the value of the hard physical life, as opposed to intellectual or academic activity. It was not just Hitler who mobilised and radicalised youth, but also Pol Pot in Cambodia or Mao Zedong during the Great Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Today, we do not have the same large-scale nationalist youth movements in the West (although they are prevalent in Putin’s Russia). Yet, we are seeing signs that far-right parties are trying to create youth movements and recruit more among students and even young women, worried about crime and insecurity. Football supporters based on a sense of tribal identity are also another target of these far-right groups. The corruption of youth away from liberal and democratic values takes place more on social media these days, especially sites propagating misogyny and violence against women among young men, or the use of knives or simply a sense of disenfranchisement among young males as they fall behind women in academic achievement and in employment opportunities and income on the labour market.

The cult of the leader is part of the picture too. But the autocratic leader often does not impose himself in a coup d’état against the democratic constitutional system, but is freely chosen and promoted by the political elite. Hitler was appointed by the German President and war hero, Paul von Hindenburg, with the support of the industrial elite and the army that believed (falsely) that once in office, he would become more moderate and be tamed by the realities of power and government. “We are boxing him in”, boasted Franz von Papen, a member of Hindenburg’s entourage who was briefly German Chancellor before Hitler’s ascent. It is the naivety, fecklessness and cynicism of elites in a democracy that give a leader the power they know he is not suited for, and incapable of exercising in the public interest. Elites, not individuals, torpedo a democracy through cowardice, opportunism or misplaced self-interest. The leader also sees himself as a hero who has endured terrible hardship and public victimisation but who has come through all of this with courage and determination to stay true to his supporters and vindicate his claim to be the “chosen one” to lead the nation. Hitler survived a few assassination attempts and claimed that God was protecting him. Trump did the same after he dodged an assassin’s bullet on the campaign trail. Hitler made much of his prison sentence (although short and extremely lenient) after he led the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 in an attempt to bring down the Weimar Republic. He portrayed himself as a martyr for a noble cause who was being unfairly persecuted by his enemies. This reminds us of Trump turning all his many criminal court cases and indictments into political ‘witch hunts’ at the hands of Democrat judges. Portraying oneself as the great, intrepid hero leading your troop supporters into glorious political battle is the image that all autocrats like to achieve, even when it is often a myth. Benito Mussolini liked to claim that he was at the head of his fascist Black Shirts marching on Rome in 1922. But in reality, he took a train to Rome, dressed in a suit and wearing a bowler hat; a picture that the Italians were never shown. Trump, in a similar vein, likes to cultivate the image of the heroic leader who stays loyal to his fans and supporters even when they break the law and subvert the Constitution in the most egregious way, as happened in the storming of the US Capitol on 6 January  2021. Leaders who have a popular mandate (even when a very narrow one, as in the case of Hitler and Trump) like to claim that this entitles them to exercise absolute power as defenders of the “will of the people”,  and thereby to ride roughshod over parliament, courts, provinces and all the other components of a democratic state. “Only I can fix it”, so put your faith in me and follow me blindly, is the slogan they all like to use.

Fifth, although not in any hierarchical order, comes attacking human rights. Again, the Nazis pushed this to an extreme. Jews were harassed and their property wrecked. Those with the money to emigrate were shaken down for donations to the Party before they received their exit visas. Nazi Stormtroopers involved in beatings and intimidation were let off by the courts, if these crimes came to court in the first place. Well before they destroyed German democracy, the Nazis began by hollowing out the legal system. Independent judges were fired and replaced by regime loyalists, or court judgements were simply ignored and blamed on politically-motivated judges determined on vengeance or retribution. The right to free speech is another early casualty of emerging autocratic regimes. The independent press is muzzled by changes to the tax system or the attempt to intimidate or criminalise investigative journalism by imposing draconian libel restrictions or invoking national security restrictions on reporting. Alternatively, a regime puts pressure on the commercial owners of a media channel to rein in independent journalists. For instance, the producer of the famous US TV show on CBS, “60 Minutes”, Bill Owens, has just quit saying that he has lost his independence after the administration put pressure on its owner, Paramount. Free speech is only the free speech of your supporters, not your critics. Curbing science and research is another tactic as well as these activities produce verified, incontrovertible facts and evidence that can undermine an autocrat’s perception of reality. It is easier to clamp down on human rights when you declare an almost permanent state of emergency justifying exceptional powers and circumventing the normal institutional processes, for instance, Trump’s flurry of executive orders in place of legislation passed by both Houses of Congress. This is also facilitated by pointing to “enemies”, external or internal, who are always there and never defeated despite the best efforts of the great leader. Heydrich said in 1935 that it would “take years of bitter struggle finally to push back enemies in all areas”. Pointing to the enemy threats allows autocrats to suppress the human rights of their opponents real or imaginary or whether they have broken the law or not. If you don’t have enemies, you need to create them. A state of emergency also justifies unprecedented interference into every corner of economic and social life. We see this in Trump’s current wish to control hiring and firing of academic staff or students at America’s leading universities, even the private ones like Harvard. The autocrats of the 1930s would not have found this unusual.

Finally, there is the fear factor. When we mark the VE Day anniversary on 8 May, we can be mindful of the bitter recognition that the Second World War could have been over nine months earlier. Millions of lives would have been spared. By the autumn of 1944, it was clear to the Wehrmacht leadership and many in the German government (except for the most fanatical Nazis living in their private universe) that Germany had lost the war. The allies were back on the European continent after D-Day and advancing towards the Rhine. The Red Army had launched its Bagration operation and was slicing through Poland towards Vienna. It was only a matter of time before Germany would be forced to capitulate. Yet, despite all the odds, the Germans fought on, right until the moment when the Red Army occupied the Reichstag and hauled up the Soviet flag. Why? Partly because defeatism could be denounced to the Gestapo and exact retribution. Partly because the German population feared the Red Army and hoped beyond hope that somehow Hitler and the Wehrmacht would turn the situation around. Fear of a future world in which the all-powerful autocrat is no longer there to provide security is a powerful driving force in individuals whose behaviour can change suddenly when the circumstances around them change. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” is a powerful human emotion. Which led to little protest in Germany when Hitler cancelled all future elections. Trump and other authoritarian leaders, like Orbán or Erdoğan, are in no hurry to leave office and may resort to constitutional change to stand for another term. Or to claim that the victory of an opponent means that the election must have been “stolen”. And fear of the enemies within or without, or of all the problems of the world closing in if the providential leader is not there to guide his flock safely through, is an emotion easy for autocrats to cultivate.

Let us not despair. Hitler used all these six strategies of democracy demolition in Germany between 1933 and 1945. They made it possible for him to stay in power and carry Germany into the Second World War, but fortunately they didn’t enable him to prevail. Hitler died by suicide and Germany lost. At the same time, the erosion or even outright destruction of a democracy from within and by its own political leaders and elites does not make a war inevitable. Long-standing territorial disputes, economic rivalries or ethnic tensions also have their role to play. Also, a leader such as Hitler, fuelled by extreme hatred, totally unconstrained and willing to take the most extreme gambles, is still the exception, even among inveterate autocrats. But Germany in the interwar years is a warning about the fragility of democracy in one of the world’s most eminent countries with a great culture, music and literature, a tradition of excellence in science and technology and a highly educated population well-connected to the outside world. Yet, given the worst circumstances and the emergence of a skilled but diabolical leader, that democracy could be totally dismantled in just three years between 1933 and 1936. We learned that people with PhDs or highly qualified lawyers could be mass executioners alongside criminals and psychopaths. There was nothing specifically German about this as similar collapses of democracy into authoritarianism across Europe at the same time in the 1930s attest. It was all a question of timing, circumstance and chance that determined the severity of the collapse and the consequences.

As we look at the lessons of VE Day in 1945 today, we should be reminded that trade wars in the 1930s turned into hot wars, as was the case between Imperial Japan and the US. The retreat of the US into isolationism and beggar-thy-neighbour economic and financial policies undermined economic prosperity in Europe and left weak democracies at the mercy of the dictators. Above all, the weakening of democracy reduced the willingness to cooperate internationally to solve crises and to build a new political and security architecture. Everyone looked only to protect themselves and to their immediate interests. A climate of “anything goes” and of “I can do what I like and will get away with it” began to take hold. It was not just Hitler who dismembered Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. Mussolini attacked Albania and Yugoslavia, Stalin seized half of Poland, and Poland took a slice of territory of Czechoslovakia. The rampage of one opened the floodgates to the rapacious appetite of many others. The erosion of democracy did not directly cause the Second World War and lead us ultimately to 8 May 1945. But it greatly facilitated the process by removing the guardrails and creating the circumstances in which autocrats could do outrageous and inhumane things. When we watch the newsreels on TV, we will see the smiling faces of our great-grandparents looking hopefully towards us. But we need to look back at them through the passage of time with horror, contrition and the bells of warning ringing urgently in our heads.