Who Went Nazi? A Compilation
Here is an updated compilation of my reports highlighting lessons from World War II and beyond for clues on how to defeat this global assault on democracy
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“History never tells you what will happen. It tells you what can happen.”—Marci Shore on RadPod
Author’s note: I originally published this compilation January 29, 2025, due to renewed interest in my reporting from World War II and the clarity with which the world is finally seeing the US-Russia alliance as a global threat to every remaining democracy. I am adding my latest investigations so you have the complete reporting todate.—hsc
We are a decade into World War III, undeclared, as the casualties litter the battlefield, both virtual and in real life.
For Russia is always war.
As Western leaders fall, weakened by fever dreams of a reset with a fascist mafia state that addicted them to cheap petrol and easy billions, they are replaced by monsters who reek of amorality and revenge.
And the thing is, we aren’t new to this.
“I saw, long before they came to pass, the shadow of things that were to darken the civilized world.”—Bella Fromm, 1932
“Party of Ernst Lubitsch, a brilliant, witty motion picture man… I asked whey he’s (leaving Berlin). ‘I’m going to the United States,’ he said. ‘Nothing good is going to happen here for a long time.’”—Bella Fromm, 1932
There are people alive who have seen these monsters before, when revenge and greed sold as patriotism and nationalism — and always cover for corruption and perversion — descend like darkness to smother all that is decent.
When supremacy is used as a blunt instrument to steal everything from those who are othered. We’ve seen all this before.
“There are men everywhere who would sell out humanity for their own personal profit. There are stupid and emotional masses everywhere who can be found to follow them, given a few slogans and some nice uniforms.”—Bella Fromm, Blood & Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary
“It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”—Dorothy Thompson, Who Goes Nazi? Harper’s Magazine, 1941
In Tragic America, where books go to die, reality gasps for air.
So I read and I read to breathe life into ghosts, who warned us each step of the way: it can happen here.
“Even now, there are those who say it cannot happen here in America. But it can. It can happen here! It can happen anywhere, unless you do something about it ruthlessly. The secret of these so-called supermen is bluff; their potent formula is to weaken through fear. Call their bluff… they are only men, cruel men, power-greedy men; and they can be disposed of the way any band of criminals is disposed of.
“We who have lived through this in Germany perhaps feel it more keenly than you do. Yet there was a time when we were as you, when the gangsters had not yet made us prisoners, when the bullies had not yet cowed us. That would have been the time to stop them there. And now is the time to stop them here.”—Bella Fromm, New York City, 1943
I am compiling my most important reports from the annals of World War II and beyond, so we can each begin the small conversations on how we reverse course and disempower the Amoral Revenge Seekers of Unlimited Power.
Dictators always fall. The enablers of dictators always fall. How quickly is up to us. History doesn’t tell us what will happen, but it offers suggestions.
“At our stage of the fight, we don’t care why the Italians brought Mussolini to power. We care how they came to string him up on a meat hook.”—Dr. Michael MacKay, geopolitical analyst, for Hot Type
“We did what we could, and a lot of us gave our lives for it. And if there had only been a couple 100,000 more Germans out of our millions who did the same, we could have stopped Hitler, it wouldn't have taken that much more.”—Greta Kuckhoff, a member of the Berlin Resistance against Hitler, from Anne Nelson’s Red Orchestra
“There's always some mystical moment when it's that one additional person. And what is that cocktail that produces that? That, to some extent, is in the realm of the spontaneous. And think about Romania. Think about, Bucharest — Ceausescu in December 1989. That regime was brutal. They had crushed everybody. And suddenly, there's a rally of support for Ceausescu, and the one guy who starts shouting ‘Boo.’ And just at that moment, the people around him catch on, they cross to the other side of fear, and suddenly, after decades of brutal repression, it's over in the next 20 minutes.”—Marci Shore on RadPod
In a blink of an eye, with one man shouting boo, regime’s are toppled. We, who are decent, are many.
Who Went Nazi?
A series of Bette Dangerous reports revealing lessons from World War II and beyond:
“Went to Berchtesgaden yesterday. The SA had a monster parade. The word ‘monster’ is fitting, I think. The brown monster rolled along the road from Reichenhall to Berchtesgaden. The pounding of their boots haunted my mind all night long. Will there be anybody who can stop the stamping of their feet all over Germany? When I was small, I loved parades. I hate them now. The feet pound, pound, pound, and under their thunderous, insensitive impact lies my beautiful country.”—Bella Fromm, July 13, 1932
Will there be anybody who can stop their stamping feet?
It has to be us, beginning with small conversations, and small acts of resistance, that ripple and grow and instill courage in others.
It has to be us.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Bette Dangerous, January 29, 2025
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I like your essays, Heidi. Are you an historian? I subscribed to Bette after reading “Who Went Nazi”. Unfortunately, this whole mess we have allowed to infest itself throughout our culture, US and Europe, I find truly alarming and nightmarish and dangerous in every way. Unite Us To Keep Our Freedoms and Rights to Live In Peace and Security.