BQ 7: How do dictatorships work?

The big questions of history

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had plenty of time to ask himself how things in Germany had turned out the way they did. He was in prison for opposing the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer was a thoughtful fellow, a theologian who mused on abiding questions of existence and the meaning of life.

He was too young to serve in World War I. And with most of the fighting in the war taking place in France, he was slow to realize the horrors of modern armed conflict. But after seeing the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front, he became a pacifist, a position influenced by the conclusions he was drawing from his theological studies. He traveled to America to further his education at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, but was more impressed by the black churches in Harlem whose services he attended.

He returned to Germany in time to witness the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. He was appalled by the Nazi ideology and immediately began to speak out against it on the theological ground that the cult of the fuhrer was a form of idolatry. He criticized Nazi laws persecuting Jews and called on his fellow Christians to resist the regime.

As Germany fell under Nazi sway, Bonhoeffer asked himself how such things came to pass. Mussolini dictated to Italians. Stalin dictated to Russians. And now Hitler increasingly dictated to Germans. He wasn't surprised that certain individuals would attempt to dictate to others. But how could they get away with it? The Germans he grew up around were civilized, intelligent people. Many were God-fearing and seemingly imbued with Christian charity. He supposed something similar could be said about Italians and Russians. What happened to cause them to support murderous regimes?

Bonhoeffer acknowledged the role of secret police. He observed and eventually experienced the tactics of the Gestapo. He recognized that acquiescence in Nazi rule wasn't entirely voluntary. And yet the enthusiasm evident at Nazi rallies revealed widespread popular approval for Hitler. What was going on?

Bonhoeffer concluded that the German people had become stupid. He used the term in a specific, self-induced sense. “If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature,” he wrote in 1943. "This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.”

Stupidity, said Bonhoeffer, explained the power of Hitler and charismatic leaders like him. “It becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.”

The followers didn’t admit their psychological dependence on the leader. Most didn’t even recognize it. “The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like, that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.”

Herein lay the true peril of the dictatorship. “Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Bonhoeffer’s status as a distinguished theologian kept the Gestapo at bay for a time. But opinions like this were more than the Nazi regime could bear. He was arrested in April 1943. He was still in prison when an attempt was made on Hitler’s life in July 1944. Evidence linked Bonhoeffer to the conspirators and he was sentenced to death. He was hanged in April 1945, only weeks before the fall of Berlin and the demise of the Third Reich.

Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on the self-stupidification of Germans during the Nazi years didn’t capture the whole dynamic of Hitler’s rule. German capitalists hoped to use Hitler to beat back German communists but waited too long to assert their independence from him. Many Germans underestimated Hitler’s cunning and the lengths to which his antisemitism would go. Some Germans actually were as evil as he was.

But Bonhoeffer’s attempt to explain the psychology of dictatorial rule certainly captured an important aspect of the phenomenon. Many Russians were terrified into obeying Stalin, but more than a few believed his harsh tactics were the price of creating socialism. Mao Zedong’s cadres in the Cultural Revolution included people playing the parts expected of them, but others were mesmerized by the perceived wisdom of the Little Red Book.

As with every big question in history, answers are complicated. Dictatorship varies from country to country and era to era. Bonhoeffer’s views provide a start toward a general theory of the subject. Future historians can add their insights, toward the goal of making dictators rarer and less lethal.