No, free speech did not cause the Holocaust

On both sides of the Atlantic, the liberal elites’ reaction to JD Vance’s bruising speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which the US vice-president took Europe’s leaders to task for their abandonment of free speech, has been nothing short of schizophrenic. Some insist it is nonsense to suggest that Europe censors its citizens (as if criminalising ‘hate speech’ or ‘misinformation’ somehow doesn’t count as censorship). Others freely admit that free speech is being constrained – and they think it’s a damn good thing, too.

The most unhinged version of the explicit anti-free-speech argument was made by Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation over the weekend. In an interview with US secretary of state Marco Rubio, she accused vice-president Vance of failing to learn the lessons of history. ‘He was standing in a country where free speech was weaponised to conduct a genocide’, she said, referring to Germany under Hitler. Free speech, in other words, led to the Nazis and the gas chambers.

Brennan is not alone in making the ‘free speech equals Hitler’ argument. The enemies of free speech see the Nazis as a kind of trump card that can be played against anyone who advocates for unrestricted speech. If only the German state had been prepared to censor Nazi propaganda, or had hate-speech laws to crack down on racist speech, then the worst crimes in history could have been avoided, they claim.

This actually turns history on its head. The truth is that, before their rise to power, Nazis and their ideas were regularly censored. Anti-Semitism and ‘insulting communities of faith’ were imprisonable offences in Weimar Germany. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for falling foul of these laws. Streicher was imprisoned twice. Editors of the Nazi newspaper, Der Stürmer, were taken to court on at least 36 occasions. Overall, there were more than 200 prosecutions of anti-Semitic speech in the 15 years before Hitler came to power.

Far from tackling genocidal anti-Semitism, the state’s crackdowns actually helped it to flourish. It allowed leading Nazis to pose as martyrs, as silenced truth tellers. ‘Why is Hitler not allowed to speak?’, reads one Nazi propaganda poster. ‘Because he is ruthless in uncovering the rulers of the German economy, the international bank Jews and their lackeys, the democrats, Marxists, Jesuits and Freemasons!’ Each act of censorship could be spun into a propaganda victory.

Today’s reductio ad Hitleram appears all the more absurd when you consider what is actually being censored under the guise of tackling hate speech. In Germany, on the weekend that followed Vance’s speech, more than 50 homes were raided in a single day in relation to speechcrimes. Possible punishments include fines, imprisonment, and phones and laptops being confiscated.

The speech being criminalised can range from explicitly far-right and racist views to nothing more than an insult directed at a politician. When a city senator in Hamburg was caught breaking social-distancing rules during the Covid pandemic, an exasperated local resident tweeted, ‘You are such a penis’. Three months later, six police officers raided the Twitter user’s house to search for his electronic devices. One politician alone, German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck, has filed over 700 complaints to police over ‘hate speech’ he has supposedly received. In one instance, a pensioner was fined €7,800 for calling Habeck a ‘complete idiot’. To suggest this police work is vital to preventing the next Holocaust is risible.

If anything, the Nazi era ought to be treated as a warning of the dangers of censorship, not as a spur for more of it. During the Third Reich, opposition parties were banned, books were burned and dissenters were jailed or thrown into concentration camps. It is the crushing of free speech that allows totalitarian rulers to cling to power and cover up their crimes, not the exercise of free speech.

JD Vance was surely right to chastise Europe’s troubling turn against the precious liberty to say what you think. It is not the ‘weaponisation of free speech’, whatever that means, that should worry us, but the weaponisation of the Nazis’ crimes for distinctly illiberal ends. To blame free speech for the Holocaust is historically illiterate and morally reprehensible.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.