World War II #3: Dec 20, 1924, When Blue Lives Didn't Matter
100 Years Later: The Day Weimar Let Hitler Walk Free
The abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II on November 9, 1918, marked a turning point in German history, bringing an end to a millennium of imperial monarchy and opening the door to the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Wilhelm’s abdication was not voluntary but forced upon him by a combination of internal revolutionary pressures, the shifting stance of Germany’s military leadership, and demands from the Allied powers.
December 20, 2024, marks the centenary of Adolf Hitler’s release from Landsberg Prison. A 100 Year old German mistake. Some call it a “liberal” mistake, but as it is, the Weimar regime proved its unworthiness early on. Reflecting on this decision proves the weaknesses of the Weimar Republic, and a century later, the critics who said Weimar should not have replaced the old German Empire can be given their due, and the Wilsonians who insisted on the fall of the Kaiser can be seen in the same way as those neoconservatives who after 2001 decided to burn much of the world in pursuit of “democracy” rather than order and liberty. They were supposedly intelligent disasters for mankind. Democracies, like all regimes, require the internal belief in themselves sufficient to defend themselves from attack, but also rational and real about what it means to belong to a society. They cannot let themselves be chained down by a formless permissiveness with no defensible concept of the good life, the moral life, and liberty. Hitler should not have survived 1924.
