A Hunter College History professor features prominently in a new, six-part Netflix documentary on Nazism.
Benjamin Carter Hett, along with other historians, provides context and interpretation in Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. The series covers the rise of Hitler, the collapse of German democracy, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg Trials.
Hett, who has written six books on Germany, said that he hoped the series would prompt understanding of the political roots of Nazism in anti-globalism and nativism, which again are rising forces internationally. The series, he said, has pronounced resonances for our own day.
“Hitler didn’t use the term globalization or globalism, but he was talking about an anti-globalization, nationalist message of asserting German autonomy in the face of a world in which Germany, in the view of a lot of Germans, was being victimized by international trade flows and by the legacy of World War I, by refugee flows,” Hett said. “They talked a lot about not being able to control their eastern border with Poland.”
Other contemporary parallels abound.
The German establishment opened the door to the Nazis, even though it didn’t like Hitler and his crude movement, because the Nazi Party offered mass support for the establishment’s nationalist, militarist, anti-left-socialist, anti-union politics.
“These guys were sophisticated enough to know that, in a modern society, you have to have a support base, and Hitler offered them the support base for their right-wing, anti-democratic agenda,” Hett said.
Hett is the author of, among other volumes, The Death of Democracy, The Nazi Menace, Crossing Hitler, and Burning the Reichstag. His books have been translated into German, Dutch, French, Italian, Arabic, and Turkish.
