Karl Rove says Republican Party is being taken over by 'Nazis'

[u/NicolasCageFan492]

https://www.sacurrent.com/news/politics-and-elections/karl-rove-says-republican-party-is-being-taken-over-by-nazis/

[u/Wukong00]

So regular Nazi and the SS?

[u/Swesteel → u/Wukong00]

SA and SS, Hitler had the SA leadership murdered during the night of the long knives to consolidate his power over the party.

[u/kandoras → u/Wukong00]

There's multiple different groups here: the SA, the mainstream Nazi party, the SS, and the army.

The SA (the Sturmabteilung, the brownshirts), who were the Nazi party's original paramilitary group. The guys the party would sent out into the streets to beat up communists and Jews.

But after the Nazis gained power, a roving band of thugs in the streets became a bit of a liability. They wanted to appeal to regular Germans who wanted a return to law and order, not regular riots.

Hitler started creating the SS partly as a bodyguard in case the SA decided to oust him, and partly because they could do the same things but with a more professional appearance. More middle and upper class compared to the average SA member's working class background.

Plus, the head of the SA at the time, Ernst Rohm, was having a falling out with Hitler. The SA had three million members and Rohm thought that the army (which only numbered 100,000 at the time) should be disbanded and replaced with the SA. Rohm also thought that the 'revolution' that had brought the Nazis into power wasn't completed and they needed to become even more radical and include some quasi-socialst reforms and wealth redistribution.

That was a problem for Hitler, because he was trying to get the more conservative elements of Germany (like the army) to agree to start working with his plans. Rohm had pissed off pretty much everyone except his own SA members and the knives came out.

The SS fabricated some evidence that Rohm was planning to overthrow Hitler (partly fabricated, he had said to people that he thought Hitler might need to be removed from power) and reminded Hitler that Rohm was gay.

That was enough to convince Hitler to go after Rohm first, in the Night of Long Knives. He ordered all the SA leadership to meet at a spa resort, and then they were all arrested and/or killed. The organization was downsized and put under more direct party control.

The German people were told that the SA had tried to overthrow Hitler, who had bravely fought them off and restored order by taking out the criminal element that had been beating up people in the street (and please forget that they did all that on the party's orders, and that they'll continue to do the same things for several more years until the war starts at which point whoever was left would be drafted into the army; the party's final, most essential command and all that).

The SS started off as Hitler's bodyguard, but eventually grew into a parallel state. Hitler really liked having different parts of the government having the same responsibilities; that meant they would all fight each other for power and prestige instead of thinking about taking him out. The SS would eventually have its own intelligence sections (in addition to the Gestapo and the military intelligence) and it's own entire army divisions.

The regular army started off as the army of the Weimar Republican. The ones who had survived the downsizing after World War 1. Old school guys who only really cared about restoring military power. They eventually signed up with Hitler because he promised to rebuild the army. They had some small parts to play in the Holocaust, and they did know it was happening, but they were mostly concerned with fighting the war. (There's the Clean Wehrmacht myth that was created after the war that said they had absolutely no part in the Holocaust, but it was pretty much entirely created by German officers who were writing up a history of the war and how to fight communists for the US Army; they obviously had a great interest in proclaiming that they had nothing to do with the genocide).

And then there was the mainstream Nazi party, who for the purposes of this discussion had always been loyal to Hitler directly and not part of the SA or the army.

The blackshirts that the other guy mentioned weren't even German. That was the name for Mussolini's Italian group of thugs that the SA was patterned after.

[u/sweetjenso → u/kandoras]

If this subject is interesting to other commenters, “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson covers this struggle and the broader rise of Nazism in a fascinating and easily digestible way

[u/Emberwake → u/kandoras]

Interestingly, the parallels here go more to Trump's January 6 rioters and ICE, and not necessarily to Karl Rove.

To be clear Rove is part of the right-wing apparatus that pushed the country toward this extremity, but I don't think he's comparable to a member of the SA or the SS. He's more like Chancellor Franz von Papen.

[u/kandoras → u/Emberwake]

Karl Rove worked for Trump's 2020 campaign.

[u/Emberwake → u/kandoras]

I'm aware. But not everyone who worked for Hitler was SA. Von Papen endorsed Hitler and helped him gain power, only to be betrayed by him a year later.

[u/FindingHappy2043 → u/Wukong00]

Why bother commenting this when that's obviously what they meant?

[u/losthope19 → u/FindingHappy2043]

Not everyone has heard of black shirts