Germany in the 1920s was a liberal democracy. Within a few years, that same society was killing millions of workers led by the Nazi Party. The causes of the holocaust, resulting in nearly  12 million people systemically killed, were a response to capitalism in crisis and showed that the only future for our class, the working class, is a communist revolution.
If we fail to understand this fact and instead accept liberal myths of Adolf Hitler’s evil as the cause, we will not understand how liberal capitalism today will follow down a similar path as German liberalism of the 1920s.
The communist economist R. Palme Dutt in 1934, five years before the start of World War II  and eight years before the mass cremations started, understood the needs of capitalism in crisis to destroy not just excess machinery and food that starving people could not afford to buy, but to destroy the people themselves.
“For war is only the complete and most systematic working out of the process of destruction. Today they are burning wheat and grain, the means of human life. Tomorrow they will be burning living human bodies”(Fascism and Social Revolution, Dutt). Dutt was prophetic in predicting the ovens of the holocaust, yet his prediction wasn’t based on the evils of Hitler, but on the needs of the capitalists.
Capitalism in crisis needs fascism
German capitalism in the 1930s was in extreme crisis. The German ruling class was defeated in World War I and the Great Depression that ravaged the capitalist countries at the time had caused massive unemployment as factories sat idle because the working class was unable to buy anything. Milk and wheat were systematically destroyed rather than given away to starving people. Dutt correctly pointed out that those decisions had nothing to do with some existential “evil” but everything to do with the capitalists trying to prop up food prices. Systematically killing people was the predictable next step for a society that saw the working class as expendable.
The politics of Nazism and the mass acceptance of the holocaust intertwined with the needs of capitalism. The politics and the actions fed off of each other. The politics of fascism grew more openly barbaric as the crisis and chaos of the system sharpened. Liberals became fascists because lacking confidence in the possibility of anything other than capitalism, they desperately sought to justify, or at a minimum ignore, what was happening.
The understanding of how liberalism becomes fascism is desperately relevant today. We need look no further than present-day New York to see before our own eyes tens of thousands of workers left to die from the coronavirus. The capitalists put their resources into propping up the stock market instead of protecting the working class. Thousands died while the Dow Jones hit record heights.
Liberal politicians pave the way to fascism
The capitalists acting to protect their interests was predictable. The bigger problem was the acceptance by so many of the daily lies told by politicians like Andrew Cuomo that there was little else that could’ve been done. As the bodies piled up in freezer trucks, Cuomo, promoted by CNN, the New York Times, and the like, fed us lie after lie. The acceptance of Cuomo as the hero of New York City liberals is the warning we should all heed. In the deadly drama that played out of a terrified middle and upper class looking for something to latch onto, we saw how today’s liberalism becomes tomorrow’s fascism.
Hitler became the driving force in German politics after the 1932 election when the Nazi Party received 37 percent of the vote (Who Voted for Hitler, 1980). The Nazi strongholds in that election were in the wealthy neighborhoods of Germany’s most liberal cities.
“It is a point of some irony that the educated upper- and upper-middle-class populations, who react so enthusiastically to the claims of mass-society theories, should themselves have been the victims of a process that they, with such evident disdain, assume to be moving other people. In this case, it would appear that the demagogues, with some aid from the media, had considerable success in moving the upper- and upper-middle class masses” (Who Voted For Hitler).
Workers: reject fascism with communism
While it is easy for many people to see the obvious and call Trump a fascist, the bigger threat to the working class is in large numbers of wealthy liberals defending the coming atrocities of war and extermination when carried out by one of their own champions such as Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. The bosses will spare no expense in hiring proxies to try to bring the working class along to comply with our own destruction.
The lesson of the German Holocaust and what we are seeing now is the folly of following the ruling class. The path forward in the face of capitalism’s crisis is with the working class and the fight for communist revolution.