Since World War Two, historians have tried to answer this fundamental question: Why did the people of Germany allow the Nazis to come to power?
Many articles and books have been written to answer this question. Here are a few articles:
Anyone who reads or listens carefully to these short articles and videos today cannot help but equate Hitler’s story with that of Donald Trump.
While Hitler was not raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, the family was not, by all accounts, poor and lived a comfortable life. Trump, like Hitler, shared the following in the childhood:
Their fathers lead autocratic households
The families were filled with disfunction (A)
Both were poor, indifferent students
Differences in their childhood:
“At primary school Hitler was a clever, popular child. At secondary school he withdrew psychologically, preferring to re-enact battles from the Boer War than study. He left school with no qualifications at 16.” (1)
Hitler’s father wanted him to take a career in the Austrian civil service. Hitler refused. Hitler tried for careers in architecture/art (he failed to get into his desired school because he was judged to be a mediocre artist) or the German military, which was reduced in size after WWI due to the Treaty of Versailles. He then decided to go into politics.
Donald Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump, Jr, was supposed to have followed his father into real estate, but he lacked the requisite temperament, so he was pushed aside in favor of his younger brother, Donald.
In adulthood,
Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. In 2016, Vanity Fair reported that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. (2, 3, 4)
Both are sexual predators. Hitler had an affair with Angela Maria "Geli" Raubal, the niece of his half-sister Angela, who worked as his housekeeper at the Berghof, Hitler’s holiday home. Trump is an adjudicated rapist, serial adulterer, and has been heard on tap bragging about groping women. (8)
Finally, this topic could fill a book I do not want to research or write. I will leave that to others. I have two brief sources that do this nicely:
“Rhetorical Demagoguery: An Exploration of Trump’s and Hitler’s Rise to Power” by Tanner Horne, and
“The Reich Stuff – What Does Trump Really Have in Common with Hitler?” by Betsy Reed of The Guardian US
Here is a link to the video that gave me the title of this article.