Could the Nazi Party have been banned?
“Imagine the Nazi Party had been banned in 1932,” the German political activist Philipp Ruch said in an interview this week. His protest group has been all over the news since members disrupted an open-air interview with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel last Sunday by making a lot of noise in the streets nearby. Ruch aims to get the AfD party banned. Asked what their 10 million voters would do, he answered, “Then they’ll just vote for one of the other parties.”
His historical argument is that this dynamic applies to all party bans in German history, those that happened and those that nearly happened. He says one of the darkest chapters of human history could have been avoided if only the Nazi Party had been criminalised in August 1932, months before taking power. But is this true?
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