Few people have spent more of their lives thinking about the Nazis than the English filmmaker and writer Laurence Rees. In his new book, The Nazi Mind, Rees offers a lifetime of knowledge about the Nazis to warn about today’s fragility of democracy. Borrowing from his extensive interviews of both former Nazis and Holocaust survivors, Rees discusses how Nazi ideology developed, why democracy proved so vulnerable in 1930s Germany, and what modern societies must understand about the enduring appeal of authoritarianism. Institutions we take for granted, he warns, can be far more fragile than we imagine.
1. Democracy is More Fragile Than We Think
"Everything is fragile and often a great deal more fragile than we think. That's the recurring theme of many of the interviewees that I met. Never saw this coming... You can have the most fragile piece of glass on your mantelpiece and it can stay there for 50 years, but someone can just touch it and it breaks." Democratic institutions require constant vigilance to survive.
2. The Nazis Started as a Fringe Movement
"Crucial statistic people should hold onto is that in 1928, the Nazis only got 2.6% of the vote. The vast majority of Germans rejected them... And then five years later, Hitler's chancellor." Economic crisis and democratic failure allowed extremism to flourish.
3. Nazi Anti-Semitism Was Uniquely Dangerous
"Unlike in previous anti-Semitic attacks going back hundreds and hundreds of years, there wasn't a possibility of a Jew saving themselves by saying, no, I'm baptized Christian... The Nazis saw you as a Jew based on your Jewish heritage, and so you found that there was no escape." This racial ideology made the Holocaust uniquely all-encompassing and deadly.
4. Charismatic Leadership Requires Hero Worship
"It was vital for a charismatic leader that the population see him as a hero... The notion of a charismatic leader being a hero figure is incredibly useful and important." Modern propaganda techniques were pioneered by figures like Goebbels.
5. Historical Ignorance Enables Extremism
"The bigger issue is absolute historical illiteracy... All this nonsense, all this misinformation, all this fake history, to coin a phrase, comes in to fill the gap." Without understanding history, people become vulnerable to manipulation and conspiracy theories.
Forget the 12 warnings. There are only two ways of thinking about the Nazi mind: either it’s evil or it’s banal. In his historical movies and books, Rees treats Nazis as uniquely literal manifestation of pure evil. In contrast, Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, focuses on its human ordinariness - what she called the banality of evil. It’s an argument that Jonathan Glazer brilliantly develops in his controversial 2023 Oscar-winning movie, The Zone of Interest. As you can probably sense from my conversation with Rees, I’m in the Arendt/Glazer camp on this. Evil is always all around us. It’s in Guantanamo and Gaza, as well as Belsen and Auschwitz.
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