Comparing any political system to Hitler’s Nazi regime is a tricky business and often overstated. One shouldn’t diminish the horrors of the Holocaust or overstate current political conditions. Nevertheless, the lessons gleaned from the Nazi’s Gleichschaltung project are worthy of consideration.
Gleichschaltung is the German word for bringing society into line with a specific political agenda. In the two-+ months since taking the White House, Donald Trump and his wingman Elon Musk’s moves are eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s Gleichschaltung, the process of serving Hitler’s goals by consolidating power and enforcing uniformity across all sectors of society. Trump and Musk are moving quickly to dismantle the federal government and bring whatever’s left of the public sector into alignment with their agenda.
According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Once Hitler became chancellor, he and the Nazi Party sought to ‘coordinate’ all political, social, and cultural institutions with the Nazi state.” Think: Project 2025. “The ‘coordination’ was done in the name of national unity.” Think MAGA. “Everything was subject to coordination: local government, professional organizations, social clubs, leisure activities – even those for children.”
“Hitler was surprised with the speed and ease of remaking Germany. He noted ‘everything is going much faster than we even dared to hope,’” Holocaust Encyclopedia pointed out.
How did the German people respond to Gleichschaltung?
In the forward to the 1966 edition of journalist Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945, he wrote: “When this book was first published it received some attention from the critics but none at all from the public. Nazism was finished in the bunker in Berlin and its death warrant signed on the bench at Nuremberg.” Although the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956, it took time for general readers to take notice.
Mayer investigated why regular Germans were so taken by Nazism. How did they get to be Nazis? He spent a year in Germany. He lived with, spoke with and hung out with 4 or 5 families, and discovered that for them, being a Nazi wasn’t so bad; they were doing better, the families were doing better, they were living pretty well. They didn’t buy into all the stories that they heard about Nazi-committed atrocities. They and their families were living better. And the intellectuals he spoke with explained it by saying: Well, they passed a law, and then another, and we thought they’d stop, and things became more anti-democratic, and surely, slowly, fascism became the coin of the realm.
In the Forward, Terrence Petty recently discussed Gleichschaltung, a Nazi term which he noted also means “bringing into line.” This was how the Nazis established totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society, including the economy and trade, the military and intelligence agencies, the media, culture and education.
In their work on National Socialist vernacular, Nazi-Deutsch/Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of the Language of the Third Reich, historian Robert Michael and Karin Doerr define Gleichshaltung as: “Consolidation. All of the German Volk’s [people] social, political, and cultural organizations to be controlled and run according to Nazi ideology and policy. All opposition to be eliminated.”
According to Terrence Petty, “Much of this process involved violence: the rounding up, beating and murder of perceived and real enemies of the regime. An essential component of Gleichshaltung was cleansing the civil service of all who were deemed to be insufficiently loyal to Hitler, accomplished with incredible efficiency and without mercy.”
Although here at home we have not yet seen beatings in the streets, we are seeing round-ups of migrants and the arrest of student activists. Each day brings another level of chaos, anxiety, firings of public workers, and accelerating threats from the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE. Trump’s endless string of executive shock-and-awe orders is deliberately aimed at forcing workers to either accept offers to quit their jobs, or to try and wait it out while the courts decide their fate.
In addition to attacking the federal workforce, Trump has set his sites on the arts with the Kennedy Center coup, and the purge of leadership at America’s historical archives.
Petty, the author of the November 2024 book Nazis at the Watercooler: War Criminals in German Government Agencies, writes: “Are we, under Trump, at the beginnings of an American-style Gleichschaltung? There are certainly some echoes of those times.”
Petty underscores that “An important feature of Gleichschaltung in Nazi Germany was intimidation and fear. Trump’s opponents are not being threatened with being sent off to concentration camps. But there’s no denying that the threat of retaliation – or falling out of favor with Trump – has turned the spines of congressional Republicans into Jello. Those who don’t agree with him stay silent because otherwise Trump would make sure they are primaried. Some fear for their lives.” And some fear that any disagreements with Trump will initiate government investigations.
While some scholars and historians have previously plowed this ground, Petty is one of the first to recognize that the Gleichschaltung process has been initiated by Trump’s White House. The parallels between that historical process and the Trump administration’s actions to date highlight the fragility of democratic institutions when faced with concentrated efforts to centralize authority and suppress dissent. Can our understanding of history provide insight into how to counteract the forces of authoritarianism? Unlike those families in Nazi Germany, can we as a people understand and act before it’s too late?