6 Quotes by Benjamin Carter Hett

The key to understanding why many Germans supported him lies in the Nazis’ rejection of a rational, factual world.

A persistent myth has it that the Treaty of Versailles was excessively harsh, and that its harshness explains the rage that gave rise to the Nazis. Actually, the treaty was the mildest of the post–First World War settlements. Experts on German and diplomatic history generally agree that it did not cause all the troubles of interwar Europe. Certainly, almost all Germans perceived the treaty to be unjust, which didn’t necessarily make it so.

Across Europe, fascism developed only in advanced democracies where the socialist left had become successful enough to frighten the middle classes. Fascism was in part a defensive reaction against the left by those who most feared it.

The people are tired of reason, tired of thought and reflection. They ask, what has reason done.

The crisis and deadlock of 1932 and early 1933, to which Hitler appeared as the only solution, was manufactured by a political right wing that wanted to exclude more than half the population from political representation and refused even the mildest compromise.

The cynical dishonesty of the Nazis’ propaganda received a significant boost from the cult of irrationality that drove their followers: the contempt for, indeed the revolution against, Enlightenment standards of rationality.