GOP redux, not Hitler, but remarkably similar

This has been circulating around the internet. Since I like to fact check quotations, I started looking for this one, but couldn't find it.

This appears to be a paraphrase however, of what Hitler both said and DID.  An author over at the Daily Kos did the kind of research into Hitler and unions that I like to do, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm going to share it here.  It provides an interestingly apt historical context in which to view the union busting efforts, and the efforts to promote redistribution of wealth to the rich from the 99%, as well as the propaganda efforts that have encouraged the base of the right to vote against their self-interest in supporting right wing policies. 

While the comparison is being made to Walker, it also applies to Ohio, and other red states that are regretting the results of electing tea baggers and right wing extremists in 2010. But that is explained by the date. The comparison should go well beyond just Walker; it is the entire tea party and hard right wing that is the mainstream GOP.  They're just old, wrinkled and starchy white tea baggers instead of young pimply and starched brown shirts. 

Here is the Daily Kos research, at least the bones of which I verified before sharing it here; my compliments to the author.

Sat Mar 05, 2011 at 02:52 PM PST

Is the Walker-Hitler comparison justified?

by litho

Tobin Harshaw in the newspaper of record today offers that people who dare compare Wisconsin's Scott Walker to Hitler are engaging in uncivil discourse, especially considering that Hitler had written in Mein Kampf:

trades unions … are among the most important institutions in the economic life of the nation

Therefore, such comparisons stand as evidence of "the efficacy of political demonization in our post-Tucson nation."  Harshaw cites fellow villager Ben Smith of Politico to back up his unstinting defense of Godwin's Law:

When will politicians ever figure out that you never – ever – invoke Hitler, Nazis or the Holocaust – in political attacks?

To counter this kind of response, a quote has begun making its way through the internet (you can see it here, but it's all over the place), attributed to Hitler himself on May 2, 1933:

We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike

Sounds a lot like what Scott Walker is trying to do in Wisconsin, well, except for the part about putting union leaders in prison.  So far, he's only threatened Democratic state senators...  There is a real question, though, whether Hitler actually said or wrote these words.  I haven't been able to find it on the internet, and the historical record suggests the quote itself is apocryphal.  However, the sentiment it expresses meshes perfectly with what Hitler actually did -- whether or not he ever said it.
Quotes from the grand-daddy of Nazi studies, William Shirer, on the flip...

It turns out May 2, 1933 -- the date of the quote attributed to Hitler -- was a pretty important day in the history of the Nazi regime's relationship with German labor.  The day before, Hitler had staged a massive May Day rally -- the first held in Germany under official state auspices, according to Shirer -- at Berlin's Tempelhof airfield.  Labor leaders from throughout the country had attended, and Shirer estimates the crowd reached 100,000 people.  However, that night Goebbels wrote in his diary:

Tomorrow we shall occupy the trade-union buildings. There will be little resistance (William Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 179).

In a footnote, Shirer cites an April 21, 1933 document detailing the extensive plans for occupying the union halls and destroying their organizations on May 2.  This document was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg trials, and shows that the planning for the May 2 destruction of the unions had begun weeks in advance.  The Goebbels diary entry and the April 21 document make it unlikely that Hitler would have made a statement on the second about the need to destroy unions.  Everyone in his inner circle already knew that was going to happen. Returning to the narrative, Shirer writes:

On May 2 the trade-union headquarters throughout the country were occupied, union funds confiscated, the unions dissolved and the leaders arrested. Many were beaten and lodged in concentration camps (ibid).

The first sentence of this passage is structured almost exactly like the quote attributed to Hitler.  It is unlikely that Shirer would have been influenced by Hitler in his composition, and more likely that a modern writer would have been influenced by Shirer.  The quote is almost certainly untrue, but Hitler's actions on the second of May did have the effect the quote points to.
Hitler publicly promised at the time that all workers' rights would be respected, but:

Within three weeks the hollowness of another Nazi promise was exposed when Hitler decreed a law bringing an end to collective bargaining and providing that henceforth ”labor trustees,” appointed by him, would ”regulate labor contracts” and maintain ”labor peace.”185 Since the decisions of the trustees were to be legally binding, the law, in effect, outlawed strikes. Ley promised ”to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of a factory – that is, the employer . . . Only the employer can decide. Many employers have for years had to call for the ’master in the house.’ Now they are once again to be the ’master in the house’ ” (ibid, p. 180).

Hmmm, maybe the comparisons aren't so far off...
Now, no one is contending that Walker has anything comparable to the SA or the SS, nor that he has an overall totalitarian design for society; there are no brownshirts roaming the streets of Wisconsin cities and towns smashing windows and murdering the GOP's political opponents, nor blackshirts carting opponents off to concentration camps.  The comparison being made is what Walker plans to do to labor unions.  Here again, Shirer is instructive.  In a section of the book entitled "The Serfdom of Labor," he writes of what life was like for the working class in Hitler's Germany:

Deprived of his trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike,
the German worker in the Third Reich became an industrial serf, bound to his
master, the employer, much as medieval peasants had been bound to the lord of the manor (ibid, p. 232).

Shirer continues on to discuss the role played by the Labor Front, the organization the Nazis developed to replace the free trade unions:

It was in reality a vast propaganda organization and, as some workers said, a gigantic fraud. Its aim, as stated in the law, was not to protect the worker but ”to create a true social and productive community of all Germans. Its task is to see that every single individual should be able . . . to perform the maximum of work.” The Labor Front was not an independent administrative organization but, like almost every other group in Nazi Germany except the Army, an integral part of the N.S.D.A.P., or, as its leader, Dr. Ley... said, ”an instrument of the party.” Indeed, the October 24 law stipulated that its officials should come from the ranks of the party, the former Nazi unions, the S.A. and the S.S. – and they did.... Wages were set by so-called labor trustees, appointed by the Labor Front. In practice, they set the rates according to the wishes of the employer – there was no provision for the workers even to be consulted in such matters – though after 1936, when help became scarce in the armament industries and some employers attempted to raise wages in order to attract men, wage scales were held down by orders of the State. Hitler was quite frank about keeping wages low. ”It has been the iron principle of the National Socialist leadership,” he declared early in the regime, ”not to permit any rise in the hourly wage rates but to raise income solely by an increase in performance,”215 In a country where most wages were based at least partly on piecework, this meant that a worker could hope to earn more only by a speed-up and by longer hours (ibid, p. 233).

The effect of Nazi labor policies?  Well, it actually looks a little like what's happened in the US since the GOP began dismantling the New Deal under Reagan -- except that the Republicans have actually done a better job redistributing income to the top!

Although millions more had jobs, the share of all German workers in the national income fell from 56.9 per cent in the depression year of 1932 to 53.6 per cent in the boom year of 1938. At the same time income from capital and business rose from 17.4 per cent of the national income to 26.6 per cent. It is true that because of much greater employment the total income from wages and salaries grew from twenty-five billion marks to forty-two billions, an increase of 66 per cent. But income from capital and business rose much more steeply – by 146 per cent. All the propagandists in the Third Reich from Hitler on down were accustomed to rant in their public speeches against the bourgeois and the capitalist and proclaim their solidarity with the worker. But a sober study of the official statistics, which perhaps few Germans bothered to make, revealed that the much maligned capitalists, not the workers, benefited most from Nazi policies (ibid, pp. 233-4).

The point of all this isn't to say that Walker is "just like" Hitler, or that Wisconsin is on path to a totalitarian future.  (Although I do admit that seeing that video of police wrestling a Democratic state legislator to the ground, it does force you to wonder exactly what his ultimate plans are...)  Rather, it is an instructive exercise to look at history in a true and dispassionate way.  Hitler did have a labor policy that centered on denying workers their rights to bargain collectively, and he did move from there to profoundly disadvantage workers in their relationship with their employers.
The horrors of Nazi Germany extended much beyond the denial of basic rights to workers.  Nevertheless, Shirer makes the argument that the destruction of the unions stemmed above all else from a political objective (see p. 183 of Rise and Fall), and there has also been a great deal of speculation that Walker's true objective in going after public employee unions has been the fact they provide the largest and most important political base for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.  Walker is seeking to cement a Republican majority in state politics, and to transform the basic relationship between workers and employers that has held for the last fifty years.
Is Walker a Nazi?  There's no evidence that he is.  Can the comparison between Walker's labor policy and Hitler's enlighten us to the dangers of the path Walker has chosen?  Absolutely.