At a time when our American economy is in trouble, and many people are suffering, we should remember that we are not the first nation to suffer.

Today, it’s easy to assume that Germans have always been well-fed and even plump. But the Germans Hitler inherited were virtual skeletons.

During the preceding years, a score of “democratic” governments had come and gone, often in utter confusion. Instead of alleviating the people’s misery, they had increased it, due to their own instability: it was impossible for them to pursue any given plan for more than a year or two. Germany had arrived at a dead end. In just a few years there had been 224,000 suicides – a horrifying figure, bespeaking a state of misery even more horrifying.

By the beginning of 1933, the misery of the German people was virtually universal. At least six million unemployed and hungry workers roamed aimlessly through the streets, receiving a pitiful unemployment benefit of less than 42 marks per month. Many of those out of work had families to feed, so that altogether some 20 million Germans, a third of the country’s population, were reduced to trying to survive on about 40 pfennigs per person per day.

In America, we face our own period of social angst. Our politicians have sold out the people for power, naked voter fraud has gone unchecked, and religious leaders have traded the Gospel for politics. America is not far from the corruption of the Weimar Republic that put Germany in a downward spiral that none thought they could survive.

Their situation on January 30, 1933, was tragic. Like the rest of Germany’s working class, they had been betrayed by their political leaders, reduced to the alternatives of miserable wages, paltry and uncertain benefit payments, or the outright humiliation of begging.

Germany’s industries, once renowned everywhere in the world, were no longer prosperous, despite the millions of marks in gratuities that the financial magnates felt obliged to pour into the coffers of the parties in power before each election in order to secure their cooperation. For 14 years the well-blinkered conservatives and Christian democrats of the political center had been feeding at the trough just as greedily as their adversaries of the left…

To all appearances, the incumbents who had been elected were there forever. They received fat salaries (a Reichstag deputy got ten times what the average worker earned), and permitted themselves generous supplementary incomes in the form of favors provided by interested clients. A number of Socialist Reichstag deputies representing Berlin, for example, had arranged for their wives to receive sumptuous fur coats from certain Jewish financiers.

The promise of healing and national unity helped propel Hitler to power.

“It will be the pride of my life,” Hitler said upon becoming Chancellor, “if I can say at the end of my days that I won back the German worker and restored him to his rightful place in the Reich.” He meant that he intended not merely to put men back to work, but to make sure that the worker acquired not just rights, but prestige as well, within the national community…

“The people,” Hitler declared, “were not put here on earth for the sake of the economy, and the economy doesn’t exist for the sake of capital. On the contrary, capital is meant to serve the economy, and the economy in turn to serve the people.”…

Four years in power to plan, create and make decisions. Politically, it was a revolution: Hitler’s first revolution. And completely democratic, as had been every stage of his rise. His initial triumph had come through the support of the electorate. Similarly, sweeping authority to govern was granted him through a vote of more than two-thirds of the Reichtag’s deputies, elected by universal suffrage.

This was in accord with a basic principle of Hitler’s: no power without the freely given approval of the people. He used to say: “If you can win mastery over the people only by imposing the power of the state, you’d better figure on a nine o’clock curfew.”

Hitler came to power in a democracy, he put people back to work, he increased workers wages, he fed the starving people and gave them hope when all seemed hopeless.

From the first months of 1933, his accomplishments were public fact, for all to see. Before end of the year, unemployment in Germany had fallen from more than 6,000,000 to 3,374,000. Thus, 2,627,000 jobs had been created since the previous February, when Hitler began his “gigantic task!” A simple question: Who in Europe ever achieved similar results in so short a time?

More than two and a half million working-class homes once again knew bread and joy; more than ten million men, women and children of the working class, after years of want, had regained their vigor, and had been returned to the national community.

Hitler’s popularity took on some astonishing, indeed comical, aspects. “A brand of canned herring,” Joachim Fest relates, “was called ‘Good Adolf.’ Coin banks were made in the form of SA caps. Bicarbonate of soda was recommended with the advertising slogan ‘My Struggle (Mein Kampf) against flatulence’! Pictures of Hitler appeared on neckties, handkerchiefs, pocket mirrors, and the swastika decorated ash trays and beer mugs, or served as an advertisement for a brand of margarine.”

But faith in men and powerful centralized government to save us does not end well. Hitler did great works and helped many millions, and to that end he justified the means.

• To spread the wealth, Hitler eradicated 6 million Jews (roughly 2/3 of Europe’s Jewish population).
• To solve crime, Hitler killed 250,000 Romanian Gypsies.
• To save the nation, Hitler killed 1.5 million children
• To keep the peace, Hitler killed 20 million Russians
• To preserve his power, Hitler targeted for death the homosexuals, communists, political dissidents, slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Protestant pastors and Catholic priests who opposed him, black people, and the mentally and physically disabled.

This is the historical context for the cartoon I wanted to share with you today (please click the cartoon to enlarge and read).

In the coming election, men and women will encourage you to believe that only they can bring hope. Politicians will convince you that the sacrifice of freedom and the power of government is the only solution. Men of guile, will convince you that the greater good can only be accomplished at the forced-sacrifice of individual.

On November 4, 2008, will you believe and put your faith in these men and women?