PANDEMIC | 3. German, Italian Death Rates

This is the third of a series of posts on comparative coronavirus death rates. See also posts of March 19 (#1, on Germany's low death rate), March 20 (#2, on infection rates). Virus Deaths Tracker (FT).

	Cases	Deaths	Rate, %
World	307,278	13,049	4.25
USA	26,747	340	1.27
Germany	22,364	84	0.38
Italy	53,578	4,825	9.01

March 22, 2020–As of Sunday morning in the Eastern United States, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) had 307,278 confirmed infection cases in 171 countries in the world, according to the Johns Hopkins interactive COVID-19 map. Of these cases, 13,049 patients died, for a global death rate or case-fatality rate of 4.25 percent, as shown in the top line of the data in the table above.

The United States had a lower death rate than the world total, as one might expect because we are at the tail end of the westward spread of the disease, so our peak will come later. Surprisingly, Germany's death rate is less than one-third of that of the United States, and Italy's is about seven times that of the United States. Italy's death rate is nearly 24 times that of Germany's–why? I speculated on Friday in Post #2 that countries that test early flatten the curve.

What Explains Germany's Low Death Rate?

Why is Germany's death rate so low? I asked this question three days ago in Post #1, and I suggested that rapid early testing was an explanation. Here is a more comprehensive answer from a German retired corporate executive to whom I sent an email asking for his views:

I am not an expert on the virus, but I have some explanations for the low death rate: Germany has benefitted from:  1. A well-distributed nationwide lab system.  2. A "best practice" testing approach. 3. Most important, an immediate start to testing. 4. Germany has health care that is well established nationwide, health insurance for all citizens, cost coverage by insurance companies starting from the test to hospital treatment and hospitals with ICUs even in smaller communities.  5. Currently, Germany's legislative leadership, an alliance between Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD), was able to make quick decisions about expanding the number of ICUs and taking emergency measures. 6. Strong leadership from Angela Merkel and Jens Spahn (Federal Minister of Heath), both from the CDU. Plus Olaf Scholz (Federal Minister of Finance) from the SPD. They agree that money is less important than human lives, and they have the strong support of the European Commission and even their political opposition in the German Bundestag. However: 1. Germans expect a rapid increase of confirmed infections and higher death rates in the next two to four weeks. The biggest problem is to stop social interaction among citizens beyond core families, to break the chain of infections and "flatten the curve." 2. Rules about curfews and isolation have been left to decision-makers at the state level. Angela Merkel and her Government will decide on Sunday whether additional 

A CNN analysis puts its money on nurses per 1,000 population as an indicator of the quality of health care, and reports that Germany's 13.2 per thousand nursing staff is an indicator of high-quality medical care. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/24/opinions/germany-low-death-rate-for-coronavirus-sepkowitz/index.html.

Another role model for responding to the COVID-19 disease is South Korea. That story is told here: https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/south-korea-learned-its-successful-covid-19-strategy-from-a-previous-coronavirus-outbreak-mers/. Rep. Caroline Maloney (NY-12) asked at a hearing how South Korea was able to test 15,000 people per day. http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/933773.html.

What Explains Italy's High Death Rate?

Looking at the other end of the spectrum, what explains Italy's high death rate? That might provide some guidance for what NOT to do. I looked for answers and one came in via email from the Baltimore Fishbowl, a lively newsletter. Cara Ober interviewed Irene Woodbury, an American living in Italy. I have excerpted, and lightly edited to save space, portions of the long mid-March interview that bear on the question.

Italy was slow to respond to warnings. Italy is a few weeks ahead of the United States in spread of the virus. Italy's peak is expected in the first week of April. The Italian government closed schools and universities on March 4. But life in Italian cities and towns continued much as usual, with people eating, drinking and socializing in public. Not till cases kept surging did the government lock down the country. By the time they locked down Italy, we were at 300 deaths. The lockdown was incremental, because people resisted a complete quarantine. The 20-year-olds were thinking, “I’ll just be fine, it’s just a flu.” Statistically, they will probably will be, but they pass the virus to other people that it kills.  Now 20-year-olds are on ventilators in the hospital, and they can no longer assume they will be fine. Italians are very social and have had a hard time isolating. When the government issued a new lockdown in places like Milan, everyone ran to the train station and went home to towns in the south they’re from. The idea of two weeks isolated in their apartments was unthinkable. What made a difference was seeing people dying every day. Now people are taking it seriously. It’s weird, because you have this invisible enemy. Everyone is wearing masks and you feel you’re in a war zone. Socially, it’s so strange – no shaking hands, keeping a distance, trying to be nice to people without interacting with them. 
Supplies and equipment were lacking. People are wearing masks, but the stores all ran out of them, especially the good ones with the filters. At the beginning, they tested everyone, and healthcare workers often. When they started running out of tests, they rationed them. Now you get the test only if you have symptoms or have travelled to certain places. It has been taking up to three days to get results, because of the overload. But Italy's availability of tests has been better than in the United States. So 10 to 15 percent end up in the hospital in need of ventilators and the hospitals are running out of beds. It’s like a war zone. They’re opening up 30 new beds a day, using shipping containers to make beds and ICU units. The lack of ventilators is a national crisis. One company in Italy makes them, a small, family-run company, and they have accepted a government request to make five times the number a month; they have stopped making everything else and sell directly and only to Italy. They have brought in soldiers to help. If some people don’t get a ventilator, their lungs collapse and they die. With a normal flu, people might need a ventilator for seven days, but with this coronavirus it can require 20 days. Hospitals in the south are not as well equipped and prepared. Health professionals are scared. Nurses on TV are saying it really is a war for them, with thirty new ICU patients a day and hardly anyone leaving. Regular operations at the hospital have been shut down. If you have tonsillitis and need surgery, you have to  wait a month. "Sorry—we have to dedicate all of our resources to this virus." Italy has an enormous elderly population.  New cases include so many older people. One reason is that the elderly are used to grocery shopping every day. In public spaces,  the only thing you can do is go to the grocery store. Everyone is there. This is probably why the death rate is higher in Italy than other places.

Postscript, April 9— Here's an article that attempts to summarize the factors that affect reports of COVID cases n different countries.

PANDEMIC | 1. Germany's Low Virus Death Rate

The following is the first in a series of posts on this topic. See also posts of March 20 (#2, on infection rates), March 21 (#3, includes Italy). Virus Deaths Tracker.

March 19, 2020 – The data in the table below show a column for death rate ("case fatality rate") with a global ratio of 4.1 deaths per 100 cases of the COVID-19 disease as of this morning, using the Johns Hopkins database (jhu.edu). It's not hard to see that Germany stands out for its low death rate, 0.2 per cent. What's behind these numbers, and are there any lessons we can learn from them?

Why Is German Death Rate So Low?

Information on testing rates might be a clue. But data on testing rates, posted by Oxford University's Martin School's OWID, exclude Germany. The reason may be that Germany's automated testing system is so widespread within the country and distributed to such a wide number of labs, that they can't keep accurate track of all the tests that are being done.

Country (Rank by Cases)	Rank by Death Rate	Cases	Deaths	Death Rate	Recovered	Tests	Tests /Million Pop.	Comment
World	Total	222,642	9,115	4.1	84,506			See updates at JHU.edu
Germany (5)	1	13,093	31	0.2	113	-	-	Automated community testing.
Korea, S. (8)	2	8,565	91	1.1	1,540	286,716	5,566	High community testing.
Switzerland (9)	3	3,067	33	1.1	15	4,000	461	Testing number as of March 7
USA (6)	4	9,415	150	1.6	106	41,552	124	Inadequate, late testing; testing only those with symptoms.
France (7)	5	9,058	243	2.7	12	11,071	168	Number of tests as of March 10
Netherlands (11)	6	2,056	59	2.9	2	6,000	349	Testing number as of March 7
UK (10)	7	2,644	103	3.9	67	50,442	749	Updated at least daily. Data show number of people tested.
China (1)	8	81,154	3,249	4.0	70,535	320,000	2,824	Tests as of Feb. 24, Guangdong
Spain (4)	9	15,014	640	4.3	1,081	-		No data on testing
Iran (3)	10	18,407	1,284	7.0	5,710	-		Questions about transparency
Italy (2)	11	27,980	2,158	7.7	4,025	148,657	2,514	Unclear if people or tests. World’s 2nd highest elderly pop.
All Other		32,189	1,074	3.3	1,300
Comment						Some test numbers are for people, some for specific tests (x2). Community testing includes non-symptomatic cases.
Source	This blog	Johns Hopkins University JHU jhu.edu		This blog	JHU	Oxford University Martin School, OWID, ourworldindata.org/coronavirus

What is the story? 

Germany was the first to design a test differently from other countries; it has a rapid testing system. Germany has therefore probably diagnosed a much larger proportion of those who have been infected, and also a higher proportion of their population.

One factor is the number of independent labs throughout the country. Christian Drosten, the director of the Institute for Virology at Berlin's Charite hospital says that this network received both technical information to conduct tests and the approval to bill for them in January, when case numbers in Germany were still in the single digits.

Germany's distributed system helped doctors to determine quick whether suspected cases actually involved the new virus or a common cold, which can have similar symptoms. Drosten said: “Other countries lost a month or even more time because of this,”  Lothar H. Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's equivalent the the U.S. CDC, said something similar: “We identified people early on with our testing who are infected, but not seriously ill.”

Why Doesn't the United States Adopt the German Test? 

The Germans developed a test for the new coronavirus one week after the genetic sequence for the novel coronavirus first became available in January 2020. That test became the basis for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) test used in countries around the world, including South Korea. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declined to use it. The German test adopted and disseminated by the WHO scanned for three specific viral genes. 

Countries around the world adopted the test. South Korea, for example, quickly started testing around 10,000 people each day and now has tested 250,000 people.

The CDC instead created its own test using the three different genes from the German test. But when state labs tried the test, some found false positive results. The CDC redesigned and remanufactured test kits, but this took time.

Multiple Problems Being Addressed Now

The United States reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on January 21. Eight weeks later, there are aren’t enough tests for the virus available. Here are the contributing problems:

• Systemic failure. “The system is not really geared to what we need right now,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a briefing last week before the Committee on House Oversight and Reform, chaired by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY12). 
• Cuts in CDC, planning for pandemics. Contributing factors reportedly were cuts in the CDC and the termination of the unit planning for pandemics in the White House.
• The PCR is time-consuming. Until last week, the number of tests that could be run per day in the United States was limited to approximately 7,000, because it just takes so long.  The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test has been around for decades. A doctor swabs a patient’s nose or throat and sends the sample to a lab, which looks for snippets of the virus’s genetic material. The test, however, is too slow. A bitter commentator has described the technology to me as "ancient." 
• Point-of-care testing is required in a pandemic. No one wants to wait for a lab while they decide where to put patients in an overcrowded hospital. "We’re just not quite there yet,” said Catherine Klapperich, director of the Laboratory for Diagnostics and Global Healthcare Technologies at Boston University.
• Shortage of supplies. The PCR swabs are imported and are in short supply.
• Too few labs. For weeks in the US, tests for the virus were being done by hand. A lab technician mixes a patient sample with tiny portions of chemicals in tiny tubes. Contamination can ruin the test. The samples must be repeatedly brought up to high heat and back down in a process called thermocycling, done on a specific machine. It takes a few hours to get results back. Labs that can do the testing have needed special approval to run PCR tests, and permission could take months. (Some of the problems listed here are being fixed.)
• State of emergency slowed FDA approval. Normally, state public health labs and commercial labs would have been able to create their own PCR tests.  But the public health state of emergency meant that any new test had to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That slow process also contributed to delays. On February 29, the agency relaxed the rule.
• FDA approval for machines took time. Machines are available that can run PCR tests automatically. However, it took companies weeks to develop tests for those automated systems and for the FDA to approve them.

Technology for the new tests is still experimental. The PCR test is hard to bring to a patient’s bedside, because thermocycling needed to run the test needs a lot of electricity. Another approach, isothermal amplification, is simpler and can work at a fixed temperature. Dozens of companies are now developing point-of-care tests for the novel coronavirus. The Verge cites three promising approaches: 

• The University of California, San Diego is evaluating a system that they say could return results in one hour. 
• Mammoth Biosciences is developing a bedside test that would work similarly to a pregnancy test. 
• Cepheid is leveraging a flu detection technology to build a rapid novel coronavirus test.

The question is whether, after a late start, any of these tests can be ready to help stem this pandemic. We should ask the Germans to help us get this done.

PANDEMIC | Avoiding Layoffs–Wage- or Work-Sharing

Automaker Shutdowns Raise Specter of
Mass Layoffs. How to Head Them Off?

March 19, 2020–The economic disaster threatened by the social distancing required by the COVID-19 pandemic could be exacerbated by widespread corporate layoffs. 

Yesterday, Ford Motor, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles agreed to UAW demands to shut down North American plants to prevent the spread of the virus. They  suspended factory operations through the end of March. The closing of auto factories by U.S. automakers could be a sign of what is to come.

To reduce this threat of mass layoffs in the face of the pandemic, the United States might consider a program that has had some success in Europe. 

That is, to enact a Federal and State Wage Sharing program, by which the Federal Government pays for, say, 30 percent of worker salaries during the active period of the coronavirus. State governments could opt to pay for another 30 percent.

President Obama looked at this idea in 2014 but did not implement it. The U.S. Unemployment Insurance system is based on a person being totally laid off. The state unemployment insurance systems provides partial replacement income to such workers. The Austrian and German "short-time working" (Kurzarbeit) programs provide government assistance to workers to allow private employers in a recession to offer their employees a reduction in working hours and pay, in lieu of layoffs.

"Ich war dabei" means
"I was there."

The idea is that instead of laying off 30 percent of workers because orders are not coming in, all workers are retained and their hours are reduced instead of the headcount. The government wishes to avoid the cascading effect of layoffs, as workers without incomes stop spending money in their communities and may lose their work habits and skills, making it harder for companies to start up again in good times.  

The governments support this program by making up some of the difference in salary for the workers, with the possibility of providing full pay for fewer hours if employees are enrolled in training programs during their extra time off. The program offers these advantages:

• The employer is better able to pursue a no-layoff policy by having to pay workers less.
• For example, if the company was planning to lay off 30 percent of the workforce, the same saving might be achieved by shaving 30 percent off the workweek of 100 percent of employees.
• Employees can use the time off to take training, take a vacation, or even pursue a long-postponed personal hobby or startup.
• The government program makes up most or all of the pay loss by the workers. They are paid to stay home.
• This benefits the country by sustaining the incomes of the workers, so that they don't have to cut back spending in their communities.
• As a temporary measure, it benefits the business because it eliminates the cost of recruiting new workers when business picks up again.
• It increases the morale and loyalty of workers to the company, and they are less likely to move away or apply to a competitor or change their occupation.
• By keeping employees on the payroll, the skills of workers are maintained.  

The Austrian short-time program is arranged between the national Chamber of Commerce and the labor unions. They negotiate the types of staff to be covered, the maximum period, conditions for layoffs and the nature of any training programs that will be part of the program.

The German government's program in 2009 budgeted €5.1 billion to replace some of the lost income of over 1.4 million workers, i.e., approximately €3,600 per worker. The program was cited that year in a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, which said that the short-work program had saved nearly 500,000 jobs during the recession.

To recap, the advantages of the program are that it maintains worker skills and buys time for management to determine eventually (if the hard times continue) how many workers they can keep on their payrolls. It encourages managers to decide in favor of retaining workers, and thereby reduces the threat of widespread layoffs. For the duration of the COVID-19 disease, companies could envision a no-layoff policy.  This maintains the stability of corporate paychecks, community incomes and tax payments. By keeping together skilled work groups, it makes recovery easier. 

The program does not solve all the problems presented by the COVID-19 virus, of course. It does not address the problem of maintaining the incomes of those without jobs. It costs money, even if it is limited to the period of the COVID-19 disease. It is only for a short-term recession or a pandemic or a similar catastrophe. It would probably best be administered through state unemployment insurance programs.

Governor Cuomo has said that the numbers of infected people will peak in six weeks, based on the progress of the virus in other countries. So in a best-case scenario, payments in a wage-sharing program would continue for about 10 weeks. If recovery from the disease did not start by May or early June, the program might have to be extended or renewed.

Paul Krugman recommended the Kurzarbeit concept in 2010, noting that Germany's growth rate in GDP was slower than that of the United States, but its employment rate did not fall as much. The employment rate, or employment-to-population ratio, is a more reliable number than unemployment because it doesn't depend on subjective phone surveys of each household member's intent to find a job.

I wrote about the Short-Time Working program (Kurzarbeit) in March 2014. This "Wage-Sharing" proposal is similar to the "Work-Sharing" program outlined in a June 2014 Brookings report, Encouraging Work Sharing to Reduce Unemployment, by Katharine G. Abraham (University of Maryland) and Susan N. Houseman (Upjohn Employment Institute). Wage-sharing looks at the spending side for corporations, providing government subsidies for the wages. Work-sharing looks at the arrangement from the perspective of the employees, i.e., sharing the cuts in factory work among all the workers. Two sides of the same coin. 

Abraham and Houseman proposed that the federal government subsidize state work-sharing payments during economic downturns. They suggested making work sharing a requirement for state unemployment insurance systems. They would modify federal requirements for state work-sharing plans that discourage employer participation. They also recommend providing states with adequate funding to administer work-sharing programs. Reportedly more than half of the states have work-sharing plans on the books but they lack adequate federal funding or interest among companies.

NAZIS ELECTED | Germany Votes in Führer, 85 Years Ago

Elections to the Reischstag, by party, 1928-1933. In 1929 the Nazis won only 
12 seats in the Reichstag. The worldwide crash in stock market prices and
high unemployment drove seats up to 108 in 1930, 230 in 1932 and 288 in 
March 1933.  Later in 1933, all parties other than the Nazis were banned.

March 5, 2018 — This date in 1933 (a Sunday then, a Monday this year) was the day after FDR took the reins as President of the United States.

It was also, chillingly, the day German voters elected 288 Nazi Party members to the Weimar Republic's parliament, the Reischstag.

Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler had been appointed Reich Chancellor by German President Paul von Hindenburg, the formal head of the German Government since 1925. An aristocrat (the "von" prefix signifies in Germany that someone has the title of, at least, Baron), von Hindenburg did not think much of upstart Adolf Hitler. However, he was at his wit's end dealing with Hitler's appeal to a totally demoralized German people. Hindenburg hoped to establish control over the Nazis by bringing Hitler into his tent.

Hitler swiftly trashed the tent...

He laid out his 1933 campaign early in the year, in a radio Appeal to the German People on February 1, which he reportedly wrote mostly himself:

• He accused the Weimar coalition that ruled the country under the Social Democrats since Nov. 9, 1918, of generating 14 years of "Marxist" rule.
• He said that unless the German People reacted against this "Bolshevism", there would be anarchy. 
• Finally, he said that Germany's fate was in the hands of Almighty God and the German voters.

Hitler's Appeal seems contemporary in the buttons he pressed. His Appeal includes these sentiments:

Our inheritance [from the Weimar Republic] is appalling. The task before us is the most difficult facing German statesmen in living memory. But we all have unbounded confidence, for we believe in our nation and in its eternal values. Farmers, workers, and the middle class must unite to contribute the bricks with which to build the new Reich. The National [Nazi] Government will regard as its first and supreme task to restore to the German people unity of mind and will. It will preserve and defend the foundations on which the strength of our nation rests. It will take under its firm protection Christianity as the basis of our morality, and the family as the nucleus of our nation and our state. Standing above estates and classes, it will bring back to our people the consciousness of its racial and political unity and the obligations arising therefrom. It wishes to base the education of German youth on respect for our great past and pride in our old traditions. It will therefore declare merciless war on spiritual, political and cultural nihilism. Germany must not and will not sink into Communist anarchy. [Bold face added.]

Hitler pays his (last) respects to democracy, 1933.

That 1933 election was the last that West Germans were given a choice to vote for until 1949, and it was the last free election in a united Germany until 1990.

The March 1933 election made the Nazis not only the largest party, but a party large enough  to prevail comfortably over any likely coalition. With a popular vote of just 33 percent of the German voters, because of the German voting mechanism the Nazi Party gained 44.5 percent of the votes in the Reichstag.

This was a huge leap. Hitler's Nazi Party had previously gotten nowhere, with less than 3 percent of the German electorate before the Crash of 1929 (see table above). Between 1928 and 1930, the Nazi Party grew from the ninth-largest party to the second-largest, with 18 percent of the vote in the Reichstag. 

Support of the Nazis in the Reichstag more than doubled between 1930 and March 1933, and became the largest party. The reason was a series of financial disasters that became global with the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. The disasters crushed the  German economy. The Weimar Government seemed powerless to do anything about it. When the cost of rampant speculation in the 1920s is evaluated by history, the rise of Hitler, the Holocaust and the Second World War should be put on the negative side of the ledger sheet.

Nazi "Ballot", 1938 edition. Vote "YES"
[Ja] for Hitler, or "No" [Nein] for 
Trouble. [Vote No, and we will find you.]

To gain absolute power after the March 5 election, Hitler engineered the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933. This made Hitler dictator of Germany, subject only to the approval of President von Hindenburg. Approval of the Reichstag became unnecessary.

Within months, Hitler banned all the opposition parties. By November 1933, the Reichstag was nothing but an echo chamber for Hitler.

That left only von Hindenburg in the way of Hitler's becoming emperor. In July 1934, von Hindenberg was 86 years old and dying of lung cancer. On August 1, Hitler's cabinet passed the "Law Concerning the Highest State Office of the Reich," which stipulated that upon the death of von Hindenburg, the offices of president and chancellor would be merged. Hitler would then be accountable to no one, becoming Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes.

In 1922 Hitler's anti-Semitism was
dismissed as "not so genuine or violent".

With this Cabinet decision in his pocket, Hitler flew to Neudeck, to the bedside of von Hindenburg. 

Conveniently, the President died the next day. Hitler was dictator.

That was the end of democracy in Germany until the Bundestag was formed in West Germany after the war. Democracy for all of Germany did not return until reunification in 1990.

In the United States, meanwhile, FDR took office and quickly turned around the financial panic with the round-the-clock help of his Republican Treasury Secretary, William H. Woodin, the railcar titan. U.S. financial markets were restored to stability, and the economic downturn was immediately reversed.

But it was too late. The dim view in Europe of American democracy and capitalism since the Crash would take years to adjust. Desperate German voters were an easy mark for Nazi demagogues, who dealt with demonstrators with violence. In the wake of the Panic and Depression, a mad hater had taken control of Germany. FDR and other world leaders would have to confront this for the rest of his presidency.

Hitler's assumption of sole power had been unexpected. In the United States, on November 21, 1922, The New York Times reported that Hitler's anti-Semitic propaganda was just 

"a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic and in line[...]"

See the full story above.

The New York Times story refers to the "Hitler organization" as a violation of the  military clauses of the Versailles Treaty, and refers to "its predecessor" — the Orgesch. The Orgesch was named after a forgotten forerunner of Hitler, Georg Escherich (1870-1941). 

Escherish was a forester and politician with the Bavarian People's Party, which had 18 members elected to the Reichstag on the last ballot in March 1933 (see table at top). Since 1919 he headed the Bavarian Einwohnerwehren, the anti-communist home guard groups. In 1920 Escherich organized his supporters into the Orgesch (from "Organization Escherich"), an anti-Semitic paramilitary group, which violated the Versailles Treaty limit on the size of the German army to 100,000 troops referred to in the NY Times clip. The Orgesch established links with the Heimwehr in Austria, an early harbinger of the Anschluss. 

On the orders of the Allies in 1921, as part of wider moves against private armies that had sprouted up in Germany since the Armistice, the Orgesch was disarmed and disbanded. But as one devil was killed, seven new ones rose to take its place. The militias of the right, such as the Sturmabteilung and the Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten, grew in size until they were disbanded in 1933 in favor of Adolf Hitler's personal bodyguard, the super-sadistic Schutzstaffel or S.S.

The Nazi gangs were much harder to disband than those of the Orgesch. It's too bad that The New York Times writer did not foresee that.

Two years ago, Timothy Egan in his  Op-Ed, "The Beast Is Us," suggested why everyone who is concerned about keeping American democracy should remember March 5, 1933 — the day one-third of Germans voted and elected a dictator bent on a world war, enough voters to end contested elections while Germany took the world into war.

Christopher R. Browning, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, reviewed a 998-page book by Volker Ullrich in the April 20. 2017 issue of The New York Review of Books (10, 12, 14). The book, Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939 (Knopf), shows how Hitler rose out of a weak democracy to become Germany's Führer. 

While noting differences between Germany then and the United States recently, Browning also notes disturbing similarities between the end of the Weimar era in Germany and the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016-2017. He concludes:

Weimar parliamentary government had been supplanted by presidentially appointed chancellors ruling through the emergency decree powers of an antidemocratic president [Paul von Hindenburg] since 1930. In 1933 Hitler simply used this post-democratic stopgap system to install a totalitarian dictatorship with incredible speed and without serious opposition. If we can still effectively protect American democracy from dictatorship, then certainly one lesson from the study of the demise of Weimar and the ascent of Hitler is how important it is to do it early. (My emphasis.)

Check out this Time Line on Hitler's ascendancy to power to see how how Germany democracy eroded over many years.