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c. 2008 Religion News Service (UNDATED) Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt were bitter foes. Seventy-five years ago, in an ironic twist of history, both gained political power a few weeks apart and changed the world forever. Hitler became German chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, not by violent revolution as some mistakenly believe but, as […]

c. 2008 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Adolf Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt were bitter foes. Seventy-five years ago, in an ironic twist of history, both gained political power a few weeks apart and changed the world forever.

Hitler became German chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, not by violent revolution as some mistakenly believe but, as Professor Richard J. Evans reminds us, “without formally destroying the (German) constitution, and with the support of the conservative establishment and the army.” The Nazi takeover of Germany was all quite legal.


Although neither Hitler nor his Nazi party ever received a majority of votes in the last free German elections in 1932 and 1933, once in power, Hitler quickly crushed all opponents and converted his position into a brutal one-man dictatorship.

Hitler’s gangster regime that ruled Germany until 1945 unleashed a world war; slaughtered millions of innocents, including the mass murder of 6 million Jews; and carried out a “legal” state-sponsored policy of hatred of Jews and Judaism that remains a global cancer and has never been fully eradicated.

In a nationwide speech two months after taking power, a jubilant Hitler demanded total surrender from the German people: “We have adopted the principle of leadership, the conception of authority. That was a heavy sacrifice at a time when the whole people was running after the illusion of democracy and parliamentarianism, when millions believed that the majority was the source of a right decision. … We have in our (Nazi) Movement developed this loyalty in following the leader, this blind obedience … which gave to us the supreme power to surmount everything.”

On March 4, a little more than a month after Hitler assumed power, Roosevelt was inaugurated as our 32nd president. He, too, achieved his position without a violent revolution, but his mandate to lead a nation was far different than Hitler’s. He had actually won 57 percent of the popular vote.

In his inaugural address, Roosevelt also mentioned “democracy,” but his words were vastly dissimilar from Hitler’s. FDR’s words immediately became an indelible part of American history.

“This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself _ nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

“Our Constitution is so simple and practical. … That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations. … We do not distrust the future of essential democracy.”


Hitler and FDR became opposing commanders in chief of their nation’s armed forces, leading millions of men and women in a horrific war. Professor Louis Snyder called the young Hitler “an unwashed tramp on the streets of Vienna” while FDR, his arch enemy, was an Ivy League patrician from New York’s Hudson Valley.

In another irony of history, the two men who came to power within days of each other also died within days of each other. Roosevelt suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Ga.; Hitler committed suicide in a Berlin bunker on April 30. Neither man lived to see the end of World War II, but they were both well aware of its final outcome.

Their final words are highly instructive. A fatigued Roosevelt, with global victory over tyranny in sight, simply said, “I have a terrific headache.”

A day before he killed himself, meanwhile, Hitler wrote his last political testament: “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.”

From their first days in power to their last days of life, Roosevelt and Hitler remained days _ and worlds _ apart.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)


KRE/PH END RUDIN

700 words

A photo of Rabbi Rudin is available via https://religionnews.com.

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