Could the Internet Have Stopped Hitler?

Propaganda

The answer was: a lot of them. But the point is that my mother couldn't tell. There was nobody wearing armbands at that bus station, no one who looked like a guard from nearby Dachau. Even my father's German assistant -- an extraordinary man who had fought on both fronts during the war, worked with U.S. intelligence for 30 years and then, in retirement, devoted his time to helping Serbian refugees -- had once proudly worn the uniform of the Hitler Youth.

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Somehow, it was during that interval between when he left Landsberg prison at the end of 1924 and when he was named chancellor of Germany in 1933 that Hitler, despite being the object of ridicule by much of the nation's intellectual and upper-classes, managed to galvanize the entire country behind him, including those men my mother saw standing at the bus stop. He did so with brilliant propaganda, ruthless tactics and appealing to a common scapegoat – the Jews – for all of Germany's problems.

It is during this period that I think the Internet, had it existed, might well have stopped Hitler. Imagine 10,000 blogs and Web sites, all exposing the excesses of the Nazis: breaking leaked information from Hitler's circle, showing cellphone videos of the horrors of the SA purge or Kristallnacht, showing how Hitler's poisonous vision in autobiography and speeches were now unfolding across Germany – and pointing to its obvious conclusion.

Most of all, giving persecuted Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals a voice beyond the increasingly party-controlled media. All of this would have embarrassed Hitler and the Nazis in a very different way than Le Clezio suggests, but it might have been much more effective. In showing the Nazis for the low-rent thugs they were, the Internet might have created enough doubt among the German middle class to take away the votes Hitler needed to take power.

After that, it would have been too late. Once the Nazis took over the chancellory, the party would have censored the Web in Germany – and eventually all the countries it occupied – subverting it to its own ends as a propaganda organ and a tool for surveillance of dissidents. The Third Reich Web would have been, like the Nazis themselves, a dangerous institution.

With one exception. I think the Internet might have stopped – or at least forestalled long enough for an Allied victory – the Holocaust. I can imagine fuzzy cell phone pictures of the ovens at Auschwitz, or videos of the Warsaw ghetto, or train schedules across Poland, somehow making their way to Allied servers and from there by-passing the mainstream media to explode on the pages of blogs and web sites all over the world. Secrecy – and Allied indifference – were crucial to the Final Solution. The Internet, even an underground one, would have made both impossible.