The Tsunami We Don't See Coming

Sunday 5 October 2025

During a recent trip to Berlin to visit my son, I participated in the Third Reich Tour, a three-hour walk that retraced Hitler's life in Germany's capital—from its unlikely beginning to the destruction that reduced this great city to rubble. The experience forced me to reconsider Hitler—not just as the architect of Germany's darkest days but as a warning for what his rise to power means in 2025.

Totalitarianism does not announce itself with fanfare. It arrives like a tsunami. At first, we see only a faint wave on the horizon and dismiss it. But as walls collapse around us, we wonder why we didn't react sooner.

To understand the approaching tsunami in the United States, we only need to look back a hundred years. In Germany—an educated people with a long tradition of philosophy, music, and science—gave in to fear and panic and opened the door to a madman. Hitler destroyed Germany from within. Today, America stands on a similar threshold.

Poles Apart, Yet Strikingly Alike

On the surface, Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump have nothing in common. Hitler died in 1945; Trump was born the following year, in 1946. Hitler's father was a civil servant he despised, while Trump's father was a wealthy real-estate developer he admired. Hitler was rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna twice; Trump attended Wharton, but allegedly with the help of a test-taker. Trump was a well-connected party boy; Hitler was a loner and poor. Despite being Austrian, Hitler volunteered for the Imperial German Army in World War I; he was seriously wounded twice and twice decorated for bravery. Despite his bone spurs, Trump ran from Vietnam and never served a day.

However, parallels emerge when we shift from a biographical perspective to a political one. Both men are driven more by grievances than ideals. They relish revenge and enjoy seeing enemies suffer. As told by a close friend and associate, Hitler was horrified at the thought of boiling a single lobster alive. Yet he sent millions to the gas chambers. Trump shows compassion for his close buddies and has pardoned many of them, including Steve Bannon and Roger Stone. But he's okay with mass deportations and separating infants and children from mothers and fathers.

Hitler ignored the German Constitution in 1933, and Trump is doing the same in 2025 by violating due process and individual protections guaranteed under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Like Hitler, Trump sees himself as being on a sort of holy mission to return order and purity to a world ridden with bad actors of all types. For Hitler and Trump, justice is not an impartial system but a weapon of righteousness to enforce loyalty and conformity through vengeance.

Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories were central to Hitler's worldview. In addition to growing up in a community that was decidedly antisemitic, he embraced extreme philosophies that portray Jews as a "parasite race" that needed to be eradicated. Trump, too, thrives on conspiracies—from stolen elections to radical leftists and false claims about Haitian immigrants eating dogs. For both Hitler and Trump, grievances are the glue that binds followers to their movements.

Hitler and Trump both turn failure into victimhood, rebranding defeat as proof of betrayal. Hitler insisted his rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts was caused by a rigged system. Many artists, such as Gustav Klimt, had been rejected by the Academy and later became famous. They didn't give up but persevered. Hitler preferred the easier approach: he had been cheated and knew more about art than the professors who evaluated him did. Does that sound familiar?

For Trump, every bankruptcy, indictment, or electoral loss is the result of a rigged system or a political witch-hunt. As one who sees himself as never wrong, Trump lacks – as did Hitler – a self-correcting mechanism. In this world, power is intoxicating; extreme measures take hold, and the unimaginable surfaces. 

Like Hitler's propaganda machine, Trump's media ecosystem floods the public sphere with grievances and misinformation. The objective is not to persuade but to saturate.

Awaiting Trump's Reichstag Fire moment

Germany's descent into dictatorship was not instantaneous. The 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent Great Depression left millions jobless and embittered. By 1930, Nazi support surged, and on January 30, 1933, as the Weimar Republic was crumbling, German President Paul von Hindenburg, formerly a decorated Field Marshal, reluctantly appointed Hitler Chancellor.

Still lacking the absolute power he wanted, Hitler needed a crisis. Within a month of his appointment, on February 27, the Reichstag, Germany's Parliament, burned down. Officially, blame fell on a lone and personally troubled Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe.

Some historians - like the gentleman who gave us the tour - believe Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göring may have orchestrated the fire. Göring's office was in the President's Residence building near the Reichstag and connected to it via two narrow tunnels. While nobody can be sure, it is said that Göring was in his office at the time of the fire. Sneaking accelerants into the Reichstag basement would have been easy. And, given the speed with which the Reichstag burned, it was likely the work of several individuals and not the lone wolf Lubbe.

The fire gave Hitler the pretext he needed. The next day, Hindenburg issued the Reichstag Decree as drafted by the Nazi Party. It suspended civil liberties and allowed for arbitrary arrests and detentions. The Decree also made it illegal to oppose the Nazi Party. On March 23, 1933, it became law with the passage of the Enabling Act (a "Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the State"). Hitler's "emergency" dictatorship was made a legal one. On this day, Germany's democracy came to an end. Democratic elections would not resume until after Germany's defeat in 1945.

Trump has not yet had his Reichstag Fire moment, but disturbing parallels are emerging. His ICE raids, Homeland Security crackdowns, militarized posturing, revenge prosecutions, and the hyping of Charlie Kirk's death are attempts by Trump to build unease. His strategy seems more about keeping a nation on edge than safe. Like Hitler's state police, the infamous SS, the mission of Trump's militarized teams may be more focused on creating unrest than quelling it. Making a bad situation worse is a tactic for gaining more power.  

Hidden from public view, the groundwork for suspending elections in 2028 has been laid.

Camps as Symbols of Power

During our tour, the guide mentioned the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. A forty-minute drive north of Berlin, Sachsenhausen was Hitler's first model imprisonment camp. Building it was no secret but rather a rallying point. The Nazis describe it as the "ideal camp," meant to embody Nazi values.

The Trump administration promotes its own network of detention centers, branding them with bravado like "Alligator Alcatraz," while partnering with governments that have high-security prisons like the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador. Like Poland's Auschwitz, Trump understands that foreign prisons offer a one-way ticket to anybody considered a problem. Out of sight and out of mind, in a place where anything can happen. Not only efficient in removing enemies, these sites are also highly symbolic. They show who has power and remind everyone that their worst dreams are possible with Trump as president.

Scaling Authoritarianism

Once Hitler gained control, the Third Reich expanded with frightening speed. Our guide was passionate about this point and repeated it during the tour. I looked into his argument and found he's right. What began as arrests of political opponents quickly metastasized into mass imprisonments and exterminations. Germany's political tsunami shocked the country into a zombie state where it was best to know nothing, see nothing, and say nothing. It was simple: Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer. (One Empire, One People, One Leader.) Nothing more needed to be said. Our guide said, "People living near Sachsenhausen thought the camp was unique. But few Germans were aware that the Nazis had over 40,000 camps and ghettos across Europe."

Trump's America shows similar patterns. His retribution lists grow longer by the day—political rivals, judges, prosecutors, and even former presidents. Like Hitler, Trump prioritizes loyalty, spectacle, and vengeance over governance.

The threat is not that Trump copies Hitler step by step, but that he echoes his strategy: exploiting fear, flooding the media with lies, and bending laws until they break. Democracies rarely fall in one dramatic moment but collapse under the weight of emergency measures.

Lessons from Berlin

I felt sick standing above Hitler's bunker, where he and Eva Braun died on April 30, 1945. How could this weak and ignorant simpleton produce so much misery? In Berlin, 72,000 homes were destroyed or severely damaged. The loss and suffering that go with such astounding numbers are impossible to comprehend. But the stories of everyday Germans told at the Topography of Terror exhibition in central Berlin put those numbers into context. Here I read of innocent lives that were sent through the Third Reich's meat grinder, transformed from human to animal. German citizens grabbed off the street and taken in for questioning, often without explanation. Many, including individuals from rival political parties, were accused of crimes they never committed but tortured into confessing them. Hitler got what Hitler wanted. Hitler was right about everything.

Adolf Hitler was a gloomy figure who spoke of impending doom, but his message didn't gain traction until a crisis struck. Without the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, Hitler may never have risen to power. In 1933, Germany's despair opened the door to dictatorship.

Trump preaches a gospel of doom, too, and insists America cannot survive without him at the helm. Yet given the stable U.S. economy, Trump is at a disadvantage in 2025 versus Hitler in 1933, when the German economy was in free fall. Trump's economy is doing well; making it worse (and blaming Joe Biden and the Democratic Party) while ratcheting up civil unrest may better serve Trump's authoritarian ambitions. He takes credit for a good economy but blames others for everything bad about it.

The horror of the Third Reich is well known. Less understood is how quickly it formed. The lessons from Nazi Germany teach us that a nation can slide into dictatorship in days, not years. What happened in Germany was not inevitable—it was enabled by fear and the willingness of citizens to look away for fear of being persecuted themselves. Once his machinery of repression was in place, Hitler's operation scaled exponentially. It explains why historians are still grappling with World War II death estimates that have risen from 60 to 85 million since the war's end.

Today, America faces its own test. Will we recognize the approaching tsunami? Or will we, like so many Germans a century ago, dismiss the rapidly rising tide—until it is too late?