Who Makes the Nazis? Illusion, Reality, and the Election

Searching for my immigrant father’s story, I stumbled on the very moment his American dream took root. What I wonder now is: Did he really believe in the myth of a land without fascism?

I’d learned by now to expect surprises.

Still, when the image resolved and I realized what I was looking at, I let out an involuntary gasp. I’d been browsing Fortepan, a Hungarian photo archive, and—knowing that as a boy, my father spent much of his allowance on movies—I entered “movie theater” as a search term. And there it was: An old photo of a Budapest movie theater. I can’t read Hungarian, but there was no mistaking the characters: Dorothy, the Tin Man and the others. It was the first run of The Wizard of Oz, the film that implanted my father’s dream of America. I’d stumbled upon the exact place. I looked at the date: 1940; he was eleven. For a long moment, I had the eeriest sense he stood just outside the frame.

The Wizard of Oz never meant that much to me. I grew up in the ‘70s, and my tastes tended towards high-quality fare like CHiPS, Battlestar Galactica, and Fantasy Island. But The Wizard seemed to exert a strange a hold on my father. Even in his final years, just mentioning it would render him misty-eyed, transporting him to some far-away wonderland.

What I didn’t know was what how grim the world outside was then, what relief a few hours in the dark might offer. In 1940, Hungary was fully in Nazi Germany’s orbit, its parliament busy passing a series of laws to exclude Jews like my father from participating in society. America—the place he thought he saw depicted on the screen—meant safety and the hope of reinvention.

Of course it was fantasy, no more real than the Munchkins and those creepy flying monkeys. Today, with fascism once again ascendant, the film’s most believable character is the Wizard, an unscrupulous huckster who’ll do anything for power. What I want to know now is: Did the Nazis follow my father here, or were they waiting for him all along?

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Who makes the fascists?

When I was a boy, our house was filled with books on the Holocaust, war, and persecution, and yet none of them could answer this seemingly simple question. I didn’t know it, but two decades before my birth, a man named Milton Mayer had tried to find out.

Mayer was an American journalist and academic—and, incidentally, a Jew. In 1953, when he accepted a fellowship in the German city of Marburg, he also took on a shadow mission: To meet former Nazis and learn what motivated them. After a year of conversations, Mayer came away with the germ of a theory. He cited the crises of political, economic, and cultural identity that wracked Germany after the First World War. Convinced that shadowy actors—communists and Jews—had engineered the nation’s defeat, Germans were humiliated and angry.

Into this stew came the Nazis, who in 1933 seized power more or less legitimately and then declared a permanent state of emergency. But with generous social programs and the promise of steady work—and the very real threat of imprisonment or worse for those who resisted—few complained. As one of Mayer’s friends told him:

“I fooled myself. I had to…I didn’t want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences…I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”

It didn’t hurt that in Joseph Goebbels, Hitler had a propagandist second to none. Backed up by quantifiable increases in their quality of life, convinced the nation faced existential threats from its neighbors, and well aware of the costs of non-compliance, the vast majority of Germans went along with it. Milton Mayer’s analysis, written seventy years ago, sounds uncomfortably prescient today:

“Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany—not by attack from without or subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted—or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”

In a world increasingly captivated by the unreal, what does “illusion” even mean?

A century ago, Hitler devoted significant portions of Mein Kampf to the notion that it was England’s superior messaging, not military prowess, that won World War I. True or not, it didn’t matter; the idea was to galvanize German resentment, and it worked. 

Today, of course, the tools accessible to the average high-schooler far outstrip those available to Herr Hitler. Some sources, including the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, believe 2024 will be “the first election year to feature the widespread influence of AI before, during and after voters cast their ballots.”

No politician has gotten far without leveraging the tools of fantasy, image, and projection, but few have done so as effectively as Donald Trump, who—despite everything we know about him—is locked in a dead heat with Vice-President Kamala Harris. No revelation is damning enough, no multi-million dollar contract for Trump-branded Bibles low enough. It’s probably all just an illusion, anyway. No coincidence Curtis Yarvin, an influential right-wing blogger, suggests that if elected, Trump should immediately declare a permanent state of emergency.

Much to Milton Mayer’s surprise, the connections he made with those ordinary ex-Nazis bloomed in many cases into genuine friendships. And the book that resulted—They Thought They Were Free—is rightly regarded as a case study of moral ambiguity. These men (and I’m disappointed they were all men) demonstrate something both very chilling and very banal about how easily we slide from simple want into something utterly monstrous.

Mayer’s Nazis wanted to belong to something. They didn’t want to feel like losers any more. And they wanted something approximating safety and comfort. Starting in small and then larger ways, they bought into the illusion that giving into their grievance would get them what they wanted. Today, of all the chilling and profound statements in Mayer’s book, there’s one I can’t get out of my head:

“I came back home a little afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under pressure of combined reality and illusion.”

Which brings me back to that snapshot of the Budapest movie theater; everything it captured—and everything it didn’t.

My father was no dummy; he knew that the conditions that create fascism aren’t limited to a specific time or place. Still, it’s touching to recall how bright his dream of America burned, how in his very old-fashioned and un-Woke way he truly believed in our promise and essential goodness. Most of all, I’m glad he’s not around to see what’s become of the place.

I don’t personally know anyone who feels “great” (or even “good”) about the coming election. No matter who wins, the transfer of power is likely to be…spicy. I was planning an East Coast book tour for January, but something told me it might be better to wait till February. Even that might be optimistic.

Here’s what I want to leave you with. I’ll be blunt: I don’t feel optimistic, not politically. The urge towards fascism is strongest in uncertain times—and times have never been more uncertain than now. But what I know from a lifetime of reading about people in challenging situations—and, of course, my own family’s Holocaust survival story—is that it forces people to figure things out. To rely on one another, to change and adapt. Even, in a surprising number of cases, to inspire deep and lasting gratitude.

Looking back at my father’s torturous journey to America and everything it granted me, I recognize that I was born into a charmed and easeful moment. But as I often remind my daughter (and, just as often, myself), we don’t learn anything meaningful in ease. Refusing to surrender to the essential tenets of fascism—grievance, suspicion, and fear—is, literally, the least we can do for one another. And for ourselves.