The Dangers of Disengagement – Germany 1933 / USA 2025

Many Americans, including myself, find ourselves tuning out the news—or perhaps more accurately, running away from it. I can’t believe what is happening in the USA. The administration is far worse than I expected, and I thought I had expected the worst. Even writing this blog post makes me fear for my safety. Like so many others, I feel helpless.

Although I no longer live in the United States, most of my family and friends do. I can’t easily ignore their plight—or that of so many people suffering from the brutality and ineptitude of the American government. Furthermore, what is happening in the U.S. is not confined to that country; it is putting the entire world order at risk. The last time the world saw something like this was the rise of tyranny led by Nazi Germany prior to World War II.

I Was a News Addict

For most of my life, I was pretty much a news addict. I would watch two or even three hours of news a day. Now, I watch almost no TV news. I still visit the websites of The New York Times and CNN because I don’t want to be totally uninformed. Slowly, I suspect, news outlets will bend to the will of the “Dear Leader”—so perhaps it won’t matter anyway.

Did the Germans Turn Off the News

Reflecting on my own behavior and that of my friends, I began to wonder if something similar happened in Hitler’s Germany, starting in 1933. Is this phenomenon we’re witnessing—the widespread turning off of the news—a reaction that has occurred before?

Hitler never had the support of the majority of Germans. In the last free election, 1933, his party won just 44% of the vote. His power came from a coalition of elites and a mobilized mass base. Sound familiar? The majority of Germans probably didn’t approve of his actions but became passive endorsers out of fear, fatigue, or apathy.

Inner Emigration

In 1930s Germany, media freedom did not exist in the way it still does (for now) in the United States. Once Hitler rose to power in 1933, the Nazi regime quickly dismantled independent journalism, replacing it with propaganda directed by Joseph Goebbels. We are beginning to see echoes of that in the U.S. today.

Germans weren’t tuning out so much as being forced to tune in. And yet, despite the saturation of Nazi messaging, many Germans chose what historians have called “inner emigration”—emotionally and intellectually distancing themselves from the regime while outwardly conforming. Many didn’t approve of what was happening, but they chose not to resist, or even to fully acknowledge it.