Back to the Führer?

On April 20, 1937, Berlin-based journalist William L. Shirer made this entry in his diary:

“Hitler's birthday. He gets more and more like a Caesar. Today a public holiday with sickening adulation from all the party hacks... and a great military parade. Hitler stood on the reviewing stand... as happy as a child with tin soldiers.”

Shirer, raised in Chicago and Iowa, had been a European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst's Universal Service before being hired by Edward R. Murrow as the Berlin reporter for CBS Radio. From 1934 to 1940, the German-speaking Shirer kept a diary chronicling the growing threat of the Nazi regime and then the outbreak of war. Published in 1941 as Berlin Diary, it would eventually be followed by Shirer's 1960 epic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

Berlin Diary makes for particularly fascinating reading in 2025. Not long ago, comparing a contemporary politician to Adolf Hitler immediately marked one as an unserious crackpot. In the Trump 2.0 era, such comparisons have become almost commonplace. A chronicle of events written during the Nazi era thus becomes a worthwhile study for anyone curious about whether such comparisons have any validity.

As the above entry shows, certain parallels fairly shout at the reader. Hitler too loved a birthday parade and was habitually surrounded by sycophants. And no one who saw Trump's recent all-caps Memorial Day post that began “HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, INCLUDING THE SCUM THAT SPENT THE LAST FOUR YEARS TRYING TO DESTROY OUR COUNTRY THROUGH WARPED RADICAL LEFT...” will fail to note Shirer's entry for March 10, 1940: “Hitler spoke today... his voice was full of hatred, which he might have been expected to avoid on Memorial Day. Has the man no other emotion?” (Shirer's March 10 post gives more Back to the Future vibes when he notes that Hitler seems oblivious to the potential economic ramifications of his actions.)

Insiders have noted Trump's fierce temper tantrums, throwing ketchup at the wall or, on Jan. 6, 2021, lunging for the steering wheel of the presidential limo. Hitler could lose it too, earning himself the secret nickname Teppichfresser, or “carpet eater.” “Someone explained it in a whisper,” Shirer wrote on Sept. 22, 1938. “They said Hitler has been having some of his nervous crises lately.... Whenever he goes on a rampage... he flings himself to the floor and chews the edges of the carpet, hence the Teppichfresser.”

Do the parallels go deeper? It is not difficult to find examples. Trump's familiar zero-sum emphasis on winners and losers finds precedent in Shirer's May 6, 1940, entry:

“Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education, in a broadcast to schoolchildren today, sums up pretty well the German mentality in this year of 1940. He said: ‘God created the world as a place for work and battle. Whoever doesn't understand the laws of life's battles will be counted out, as in the boxing ring. All the good things in this world are trophy cups. The strong win them. The weak lose them.’”

The informational bubble in which most Germans lived will certainly sound familiar. Shirer quotes numerous outrageous headlines from the Nazi press — “WOMEN AND CHILDREN MOWED DOWN BY CZECH ARMOURED CARS, EXTORTION, PLUNDERING, SHOOTING — CZECH TERROR IN SUDETEN GERMAN LAND GROWS WORSE FROM DAY TO DAY!” — before writing on Aug. 10, 1939: “How completely isolated a world the German people live in.... You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.”

Yet Shirer also notes how the foreign press did their part in advancing the Nazi agenda. In an undated post from June 1938, Shirer recaps an editorial in the London Times, a.k.a. “the Old Lady”: “The Czechs and some of the English here much exercised about an editorial in the London Times on June 3 advising the Czechs to hold a plebiscite for the Sudeten Germans and if they want to join the Reich to let them. The Times argues that if this is done, Germany would lose any claim to interfere in the affairs of Czechoslovakia. The Old Lady simply won’t learn.”

As an American, Shirer looked for his own parallels to domestic politics. Years earlier, on Sept. 4, 1934, he had observed a crowd of Hitler faithful in Nuremberg: “I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment,” Shirer wrote. “They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.”

Those who marvel at the unwavering devotion of MAGA faithful might be hard pressed to find an example to top Shirer's diary entry for Feb. 4, 1940:

“In Germany it is a serious penal offence to listen to a foreign radio station. The other day the mother of a German airman received word from the Luftwaffe that her son was missing and must be presumed dead. A couple of days later the BBC in London, which broadcasts weekly a list of German prisoners, announced that her son had been captured. Next day she received eight letters from friends and acquaintances telling her they had heard her son was safe as a prisoner in England.... The mother denounced all eight to the police for listening to an English broadcast, and they were arrested.”

Shirer was on hand for many key moments in Hitler's rise — in Vienna at the Anschluss, in Prague during the last days before German occupation, and in the forest at Compiègne where Hitler forced the French to surrender in the same railcar where Germany had formally capitulated in 1918. (In May 1937, Shirer and his wife Tess escaped another of the decade's epic disasters when they declined the offer of free tickets on the final voyage of the Hindenburg.)

Major figures pop up in Shirer's narrative, sometimes in unexpected ways. During a 1938 stay in London, Shirer writes on March 15: “Talked with Winston Churchill on the phone this morning. He will do a 15-minute broadcast, but wants 500 dollars.” Later, Shirer notes that German broadcasts always refer to Churchill by his initials, W.C., since those letters also appear on the doors of German bathrooms.

At one point Shirer mentions that, as he reads his carefully censored CBS radio reports, he can hear the braying of propagandist Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce) just a couple of studios down the hall.

Shirer's diary offers a compelling week-by-week, ground-level account. But how legitimate a record is it? Shirer himself later admitted a certain amount of revision was done before publication, most notably to a 1935 entry originally written after Hitler's speech repudiating the Treaty of Versailles. At the time Shirer suggested that Hitler might genuinely want peace. That entry was rewritten for the published version of the diary, to reflect Shirer's subsequent understanding of the real Führer.

Still, Berlin Diary was published in 1941 with Hitler still riding high. So no 20/20 hindsight was involved when, after the invasion of Norway, Shirer wrote his April 14, 1940, entry: “Hitler is sowing something in Europe that one day will destroy not only him but his nation.”

However many 21st-century echoes readers may find, Berlin Diary records significant differences. Shirer's chronicle makes clear the Trump regime is not exactly Hitler redux.

As chronicled by Shirer, Hitler plotted vengeance for the Treaty of Versailles and devised a blueprint for the defeat of Europe and the annihilation of Jews and Bolsheviks. The Nazi leader was a megalomaniac and a fanatic. Trump is a megalomaniac and an imbecile. Hitler had a plan, laid out explicitly in Mein Kampf. Anyone looking for Trump's grand design should probably skip the ghostwritten Trump: The Art of the Deal and listen instead to the Access Hollywood tape.

Trump is no big thinker. He plans like a goldfish remembers. The president's capacity for forethought probably doesn't extend much beyond lunch.

Trump is clearly an authoritarian, with a dangerous ignorance or outright disregard for constitutional government. But Hitler he's not. Trump lacks the same capacity for insane calculation. Project 2025 is an authoritarian plan, but it isn't Trump's. It may be no less dangerous for that, but the fact that Project 2025 was the product not of Trump but of his skeevy brownshirt underlings is instructive. Trump's drives are personal — it's always about Trump, Trump, Trump. If the evil schemes of Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon et al. don't interfere with that, fine. But as soon as you embarrass Trump or annoy him in any way, you're done. There is never any wider strategy beyond feeding Trump's insecurity and narcissism.

Some might find parallels between Hitler's dishonest promises of peace and Trump's recent about-face on bombing Iran. While it's impossible for outsiders to know for sure, the comparison is unlikely to fit. Hitler's disingenuous peace plans, which always followed acts of naked aggression, were obviously calculated lies. Trump's U-turn more likely reflects his previously noted tendency to agree with whoever speaks to him last.

None of this is to say that the United States is not headed in a dangerous and despicable direction. History does not have to repeat precisely. There are plenty of historical parallels, and contemporary ones too, that should inspire fear in the heart of any decent person who contemplates the future under Donald Trump. And at the very least, Berlin Diary illustrates the many ways that malignant narcissists, and their followers, think alike.

Shirer died in 1993 at the age of 89. Were he alive today, there is little doubt he would be drawing the same parallels that modern readers of Berlin Diary can now trace. Decades later, Shirer wrote of his home country: “It would be easier here for a right-wing dictator than anyplace else.”

“I have moments of great depression about the United States,” Shirer wrote, “and then something happens to restore faith.”