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Echoes of Weimar

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  November 22, 2025 9:00 AM

They say those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. It seems the powers that be in Germany missed that memo, which is ironic considering Germany's not-too-distant history.

During the Weimar Republic, Germany had strict speech codes and laws that it ruthlessly enforced. Those laws let the government censor press criticism as well as anything it considered "advocating violence" (gee, doesn't that sound familiar?). Of course, these laws targeted many Nazi propaganda outlets and speakers, including Adolf Hitler himself.

It was in November, 102 years ago, that Hitler and a band of supporters staged a putsch at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich, Bavaria. They were trying to overthrow the Weimar Republic and put the Nazis in power. The putsch ended in a shootout between the Nazis and Bavarian soldiers.

For his part in it, Hitler was sentenced to five years in prison but served only eight or nine months. He was banned from speaking in public for two years following that release.

Fat lot of good that did, huh?

Earlier this year, Vice President J.D. Vance humiliated European politicians in general, and German politicians in particular, by taking them to task over speech codes and laws that are eerie echoes of those imposed by the Weimar Republic. 

“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat," Vance said. He added, "You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail."

Margaret Brennan of CBS News was so appalled by Vance's comments that she tried (and failed spectacularly) to blame the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust on free speech. The exact opposite is true, of course. It was the suppression of free speech that gave the Nazis power. 

We're not surprised that Brennan wasn't listening.

But it seems Germany wasn't listening, either, because in yet another example of anti-free speech authoritarianism, the police raided the home of a German man because he had the audacity to call politicians "parasites" in a social media post.

Here's more:

The thing to understand is that this is not about one man’s post. It is about a bureaucracy that treats speech as something to manage and a set of enforcement structures that expand to fill the space they are given.

Start with the enforcement context. Germany has built a sprawling ecosystem around “online hate”: specialized prosecutor units, NGO tip lines, and automated scanning for taboo keywords.
The model is compliance first and legal theory second.

Once you create an apparatus like this, it behaves the way bureaucracies behave. It looks for work. It justifies resources by producing cases. A tiny X post with inflammatory language becomes a target because it contains the right keyword, not because it has societal impact.

Police behavior fits the same pattern. Confiscating phones is strategically useful because it imposes real pain without requiring a conviction.

And here's the post in question:

There is nothing violent or hateful in that post. It is a factual, albeit acerbic, observation of an economic reality: those who live off the largess of the state do not contribute to the state.

If politicians and authorities worry that it's an incitement of violence against them, it reveals their guilty consciences.

The truth, after all, hurts.

Of course, I'm not saying Germany is on track to relive the Third Reich. But there are lessons from history that we need to learn, and the first one is this: suppressing free speech does more harm than good. Given the demographic shift in Germany, it would do well for them to realize this before it's too late.