Author’s Note: This article is an English translation of my original piece, initially written in Turkish for a domestic audience in Türkiye. (A link to the original Turkish text can be found at the very end of this post.) Intertwined with my personal narrative of exile, this essay explores how a political nobody transformed into an absolute, unquestioned totalitarian leader. It serves as an anatomy of how the extreme naivety of the establishment—opposition figures, corporate elites, liberal intelligentsia, and powerful religious factions alike—profoundly underestimated a demagogue. By drawing explicit parallels to the historical enablers of Adolf Hitler, I examine how these elites blindly paved the way for Erdoğan’s unchecked rise, ultimately sealing their own fate.
These were Ludwig Beck’s final words.
Hitler’s suicide was still nine months and ten days away.
Beck, of course, did not know that. “I am thinking of earlier times,” he said.
He was in pain.
He was bidding farewell to life.
Moments earlier, he had shot himself.
He was not yet dead.
He was dying.
But it was not physical pain that gave rise to those words.
What weighed on him was the fate of his country.
He was thinking of better days.
Days that would never return.
Days whose value had gone largely unrecognized at the time—days that seemed permanent, as though they had always existed and always would.
*****
Germany’s twilight had begun years earlier. At some point, the sun had set, leaving the country in a darkness that would endure for years.
The Nazis mockingly referred to Beck and his associates as the Black Orchestra (Schwarze Kapelle). In reality, however, it was Germany itself that had turned dark.
Together with a small group of friends and colleagues, Beck had made one final attempt to save his country.
He did so in the hope of restoring what had been lost.
But no such dawn was about to break.
They had failed.
And they were paying for that failure with their lives.
Beck was leaving the world with a profound sense of loss.
Within minutes, General Fromm would order a non-commissioned officer to finish what Beck’s own gunshot had failed to do.
Ludwig Beck was passing away from this world, longing for the old days.
While looking back on a Germany that no longer existed.
*****
He was among the first German generals to recognize the disaster toward which Hitler was leading the country.
As Chief of the Army General Staff, Beck had already seen the danger by 1937–38.
When Hitler’s plans to annex Austria and occupy Czechoslovakia began circulating within military circles, Beck warned that Germany was heading toward catastrophe.
He shared those concerns with colleagues and fellow officers.
During the summer of 1938, he wrote a series of confidential memoranda in an effort to alert those in positions of authority.
In one of them, he wrote:
“The interests of the state cannot be sacrificed to the ambitions of a single individual.”
His views brought him into conflict with his superiors.
The sense of helplessness he experienced eventually led him to resign.
In August 1938, he stepped down from his position and began opposing Hitler as a private citizen.
In effect, he went underground.
Through secret meetings with former officers and senior civil servants, he sought to organize resistance against the dictator.
*****
Beck reappeared on the historical stage on July 20, 1944, at the Wolf’s Lair.
It was there, at Hitler‘s military headquarters—known as the Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair), located today in Poland—that the most famous assassination attempt against Hitler took place.
History remembers it as Operation Valkyrie.
The film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, brought the story to a global audience.
As a former military officer, Ludwig Beck was not physically present at the Wolf’s Lair that day. Yet he was one of the principal architects of the coup.
Alongside Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who placed the bomb beside Hitler.
“Remember,” Beck had warned, “this is a military operation. Nothing ever goes according to plan.”
As it happened, a seemingly minor detail saved the Fuhrer‘s life.
Hitler, unsurprisingly, interpreted his survival as a divine sign.
And, needless to say, as yet another manifestation of ‘God’s favor.’1
*****
The conspiracy was uncovered within hours.
The leaders of the coup were granted the privilege of what was known as an “honorable suicide.”
They were expected to take their own lives.
Ludwig Beck was first in line.
Had the coup succeeded, he would have become the new president of Germany.
His final words were:
“I am thinking of earlier times” (Ich denke an frühere Zeiten).
Those were his exact words.
That is how they are recorded in Offiziere gegen Hitler (Officers Against Hitler), the memoir of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, one of the officers directly involved in the July 20 plot.
In essence, the phrase meant: “I am thinking of the good old days.”
The remark can also be read as a form of self-criticism.
A regretful reflection on having failed to recognize Hitler’s true nature sooner, on having underestimated him, and on the passivity and naivety of the early years.
It was also a lament for the collective blindness of an entire nation.
*****
He lay on the floor, dying.
Much like the German nation itself.
Standing over him was General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Ersatzheer, or Reserve Army—the very force at the center of the coup and the most critical military formation involved in the plot.
Throughout the conspiracy, Fromm had played both sides.
When Beck‘s suicide attempt failed, Fromm ordered a non-commissioned officer who was waiting nearby to finish the job.
Beck was executed where he lay.
*****
In fact, the operation was centered on the very army commanded by Fromm.
While Germany‘s field armies were fighting on the front lines, the Ersatzheer, or Reserve Army, remained inside the country, responsible for maintaining internal order and administering emergency measures.
It reported directly to Hitler.
Claus von Stauffenberg—the officer who placed the bomb beneath the conference table at the Wolf’s Lair and later portrayed by Tom Cruise in Valkyrie—was, in fact, Fromm’s chief of staff.
Fromm played a double game from the very beginning.
He neither joined the conspiracy nor opposed it. Instead, he left the door open, implying that he might support the plot if Hitler were killed and the coup succeeded.
Under the plan, Hitler would first be assassinated, after which Operation Valkyrie would be activated to seize control of the government.
Friedrich Fromm was the only man with the legal authority to set that plan in motion.
That is why he waited until the very last moment.
Although he was fully aware of the conspiracy, he never reported the plotters. Had they succeeded, there is little doubt that he would have joined Operation Valkyrie and assumed a position in the new Germany.
When the coup failed, however, he turned against them.
That same night, he ordered the execution of four conspirators, including his own chief of staff, Claus von Stauffenberg.
****
The Nazi regime did not forgive him either.
He was found guilty of having known about the conspiracy in advance, failing to report it, failing to stop it, and attempting to play both sides.
Approximately eight months after Ludwig Beck’s death, on March 12, 1945, Friedrich Fromm was executed by firing squad.
We do not know what he was thinking in his final moments.
Nor do we know his last words.
He was executed discreetly behind prison walls.
*****
Forty-nine days after Fromm‘s execution, Hitler took his own life.
Remarkably, it was exactly nine months and ten days after Ludwig Beck‘s death.
It was, in a sense, a new birth—but neither Beck nor his fellow conspirators would live to see it.
In the end, they had been right.
Hitler had led not only a country and a nation, but humanity itself toward catastrophe.
“The interests of the state cannot be sacrificed to the ambitions of a single individual,” Beck had warned.
No one listened.
A nation intoxicated by the euphoria of victory had followed the ambitions of a single man and plunged into the abyss.
*****
What were the “earlier times” Ludwig Beck was thinking about?
Was he referring to the glory days of the German Empire before the First World War?
Or was he thinking of the years that followed the war—years marked by economic hardship, political instability, and social turmoil, yet which, in comparison with the Nazi era, could still be remembered as better times?
We do not know.
What we do know is that Germany—and much of Europe’s political and economic elite—paid a heavy price for underestimating Hitler in the early years.
Take Franz von Papen, one of the leading figures in German politics and a former chancellor.
He believed Hitler could serve as a useful puppet chancellor.
He believed he and others could keep him under control.
Indeed, it was Papen who helped clear Hitler’s path to power.
When Hitler became chancellor, Papen became his vice chancellor. He would later be appointed Germany’s ambassador to Ankara.
History remembers him as one of the most spectacular miscalculators in modern politics.
After the Nuremberg trials, Papen attempted to rehabilitate his reputation. In his memoirs, he essentially argued: “They blame me for making Hitler chancellor, as if that had anything to do with it!“
He wrote of the communist threat that loomed over Germany at the time, of the chronic instability that had plagued the country since Versailles, and of how, under those circumstances, Hitler appeared to many as the only viable option.
The reality was simpler.
Papen believed Hitler could be managed.
Hitler would occupy the stage, while Germany‘s traditional political elite would remain in control behind the scenes.
*****
The same was true of President Paul von Hindenburg.
He had little personal regard for Hitler, yet he came to view him as the only man capable of restoring order.
Under pressure from Papen and his allies, Hindenburg appointed him chancellor.
Fortunately for him, he died only a year later, before he could witness the full scale of the disaster that followed.
As for Papen, in 1939, while serving as Germany’s ambassador to Turkey, he wrote to Hitler urging the restoration of the rule of law and the adoption of a constitutional framework.
He still did not understand what he was dealing with.
In truth, he never would.
During the 1930s, many of Germany‘s most powerful businessmen and industrialists financed Hitler as what they saw as the last hope against communism.
Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German National People’s Party and a powerful media magnate, not only entered into a coalition with Hitler but also helped legitimize him within conservative German circles.
He joined Hitler’s cabinet as a minister, only to find himself quickly pushed aside once the Fuhrer consolidated power.
Alfried Krupp, Germany’s leading arms manufacturer, supported Hitler.
So did Thyssen, the giant of the steel and heavy industry sectors.
So did IG Farben, Europe’s chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate, whose holdings included Bayer.
In 1932, many of these industrialists signed the famous Industrialists’ Petition in support of Hitler.
Politicians and industrialists alike believed they could use him for their own purposes.
They underestimated him.
They looked down on him.
And before long, they had surrendered all power to him.
Hitler, meanwhile, had his own plan.
From the outset, he intended to use them for as long as they were useful—and once he had secured absolute power, to implement his own agenda.
*****
Another figure who would later join the long line of people attempting to explain—and justify—their support for Hitler was Fritz Thyssen, the steel magnate and founder of the Thyssen industrial empire.
At least in his case, the reckoning came before the war was over.
The turning point was Kristallnacht—the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938.
It was then that he finally grasped the true nature of the regime, and he would later say: “That night everything changed. Hitler had no moral limits.”
Thyssen decided to break with the Nazi regime and fled Germany with his wife.
They first went to Switzerland and then to France.
He also took a number of documents with him.
*****
In 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war, Thyssen met with the publisher Emery Reves.
He spoke at length about Hitler and provided Reves with documents he had brought out of Germany.
The two conducted a series of extensive interviews.
After the war began, Thyssen was detained in France.
In 1940, he was captured by the Nazis and taken back to Germany.
He was imprisoned in concentration camps.
While he remained in Nazi custody, Reves published his book in Britain in 1942.
Its title was I Paid Hitler.
Reflecting on his support for the dictator, Thyssen argued that the growing influence of communism in Germany had alarmed him and that he feared his country would collapse as Russia had.
He had come to believe that Hitler and the National Socialists could restore order.
By the time he recognized Hitler‘s true nature, however, it was far too late.
He, too, had fallen victim to one of the greatest misjudgments of the twentieth century.
Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen—the physician, writer, and diarist who spent those years recording his anguish—viewed these late conversions and expressions of regret with little sympathy.
As a non-Jewish member of Germany’s conservative elite, he was one of the very few voices who opposed Hitler from beginning to end.
For eight years, he kept a secret diary.
These writings were later published under the title Diary of a Man in Despair.
Reflecting on the failure of the July 20 plot, Reck-Malleczewen wrote with evident bitterness:
“Ah, now, really, gentlemen, this is a little late. You made this monster, and as long as things were going well you gave him whatever he wanted. You turned Germany over to this arch-criminal, you swore allegiance to him by every incredible oath he chose to put before you—you, officers of the Crown, all of you. And so you made yourselves into the Mamelukes of a man who carries on his head responsibility for a hundred thousand murders and who is the cause of the sorrow and the object of the curses of the whole of the world. And now you are betraying him, as yesterday you betrayed the Republic, and as the day before yesterday you betrayed the Monarchy. (…) And now that the firm is going bankrupt, they are betraying it to provide themselves with a political alibi— just as they betrayed all the others who were no longer useful in their drive to get and hold power.”
A few months later, he too would be arrested, sent to a concentration camp, and die before he could witness Hitler’s suicide forty days later.
*****
Everyone and every nation that underestimated Hitler paid dearly for it.
They judged him according to the normal standards of politics and human behavior.
They assumed there were limits he would not cross.
They were wrong.
In his book Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger cites remarks made by Joseph Goebbels during a confidential briefing in April 1940.
According to Kissinger, Goebbels reflected on how thoroughly Germany’s opponents had misread the Nazi movement:
“Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark con- cerning Germany’s real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going or that our oath of legality was just a trick… They could have suppressed us. They could have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been that, the end. No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in foreign policy too…. In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): ‘The new Reich Chan- cellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!‘ But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!”
*****
Cicero once wrote:
“When I notice how carefully arranged his hair is, and when I watch him adjusting the parting with one finger, I cannot imagine that this man could conceive of such a wicked thing as to destroy the Roman constitution.”
Nearly two thousand years later, Stefan Zweig would say something remarkably similar, this time about Hitler:
“We never imagined that a man sitting on a mountain in Berchtesgaden could shatter our lives.” (In the English-language edition of the book, the passage appears as follows: “With whom have we not spent heart-warming hours there, looking out from the terrace over the beautiful and peaceful landscape, without suspecting that exactly opposite, on the mountain of Berchtesgaden, a man sat who would one day destroy it all?”)
In The World of Yesterday, writing about the years 1933 and 1934, Zweig reflected:
“At the time, I did not yet know that we would all become victims of a single man’s lust for power and his rage.” (…and at one blow all justice in Germany was smashed. (…) when I looked at these fugitives, that I ought to perceive in their pale faces, as in a mirror, my own life and that we all, we all, we all would become victims of the lust for power of this one man.)
That was the world of yesterday.
Zweig‘s “yesterday” was the same world Beck had in mind when he spoke of “earlier times.”
In fact, Zweig had already seen where events were heading by 1934.
In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “The world we loved has gone beyond recall.”
And indeed, it never did.
A refugee fleeing Nazi Germany, Zweig would pass through three countries and three continents. He first moved to Britain, then to the United States, and eventually to Brazil, where he took his own life in 1942.
Ludwig Beck‘s “honorable suicide” was still two years away.
Hitler‘s suicide was nearly three years away.
*****
The dark chapter that Hitler had set in motion in Munich in 1922 with the declaration, “I believe God has sent me for a mission,” was coming to an end.
Nearly a century has passed since then.
I am writing these lines from the United States.
After exile had carried me across three countries -The Philippines, Sweden and USA- and three continents.
And I find myself thinking about earlier times.
I think, for example, of my own indifference when I read, in the WikiLeaks cables in 2010, that “Erdogan believes that God has chosen him to lead Turkey and sees himself as a kind of Caesar of Anatolia.”
The last thirty-two years of my country’s history have been shaped by the painful consequences of those who underestimated Erdogan and assumed that there were limits he would never cross.
*****
Looking back now, after exile carried me across three countries and three continents, I can finally see how blind we were.
When Deniz Baykal, then leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP)—the party founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey—helped clear the way for the politically banned Erdogan to enter parliament, those around him warned that it was an extremely dangerous gamble.
“No,” Baykal replied. “He won’t last two months. You’ll see. He won’t last two months.”
Years later, responding to Zülfü Livaneli—a novelist, musician, and former CHP lawmaker—who publicly recounted the episode and identified witnesses to it, Baykal defended his decision:
“I believed that allowing the leader of the AKP at the time to regain his political rights and serve in parliament was a requirement of democracy.”
If this was not part of some hidden agenda but simply a grave error born of political naivety, then Baykal, too, belongs among those who made one of history’s great miscalculations.
Yes, I acknowledge that the early years of Erdogan’s rise cannot be compared directly to Hitler’s emergence and ascent to power. Erdogan’s rhetoric, policies, and actions—particularly after founding the AKP—provided ample grounds for the naivety of those who genuinely hoped to make Turkey a more democratic country.
But that is precisely the point.
Erdogan did not suddenly appear in 2002. His rhetoric during the years between his election as mayor in 1994 and the AKP’s rise to power in 2002, his covert organizational networks—which I discussed at length in my book Ten Percent—and even his intentions, which he made little effort to conceal, should not have been forgotten so easily. In reality, there were more than enough reasons not to excuse such profound naivety.
And who did not contribute, in one way or another, to that naivety that so often bordered on betrayal?
The founding figures of the AKP.
The Gulen Movement.
Prominent liberal intellectuals.
Business leaders.
Public intellectuals.
And later, even many of Erdogan‘s former opponents.
Was there a vast international project designed to keep Erdogan in power?
Perhaps.
But while some remained committed to such a project knowingly, the excessive naivety of others helped bury the country in a darkness that would last for years.
*****
The tragedy—or perhaps this political vaudeville—continues to unfold in all its nakedness and noise.
Some boarded Erdogan‘s boat in the name of democracy.
Others in the name of religion.
Others in the name of reason of state.
Still others in the name of some supposed purification.
Those who yesterday denounced Kemal Kılıçdaroglu‘s presidential candidacy as serving the interests of “the state” now describe Kılıçdaroglu himself as a man of “the state.”2
Who knows what today’s heroes will be called tomorrow?
When one remembers how many of today’s so-called traitors once went door to door campaigning for Erdogan in the name of democracy, the past begins to feel like a childhood tale recalled from a distant time.
And yet one remembers it all too clearly.
Those old days…
*****
I am writing these lines from far away.
After having lived in three countries and on three continents.
And I find myself thinking about earlier times.
We did not yet know that we would all become victims of a single man’s ambition and rage.
Then, at one blow all justice in Turkey was smashed.
We never imagined that an insatiable young man playing football in the streets of Kasımpaşa could one day shatter our lives.
The country we loved had gone beyond recall.
I find myself thinking about earlier times.
And I realize how deeply I miss even that old Turkey—the troubled Turkey, the turbulent Turkey, the Turkey I once complained about and dreamed of changing.
Even the ‘Turkey of yesterday.’
Those old days…
Ahmet Donmez, June 13, 2026
Read the original article in Turkish: https://www.ahmetdonmez.net/eski-guzel-gunleri-dusunuyorum/
- On the night of the failed military coup attempt of July 15, 2016, Erdoğan famously declared: “This is a gift from God.” For this reason, the aftermath of July 15 is often compared by critics and commentators to the political exploitation of the Reichstag Fire of 1933. ↩︎
- When Kılıçdaroğlu ran for president, he was the leader of the CHP. Following his defeat in the elections, he was ousted from his party chairmanship during the party congress. Recently, however, Erdoğan’s controlled courts have orchestrated a controversial intervention, pulling Kılıçdaroğlu back to the helm of the CHP. The clear objective of this judicial engineering is to block Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu—currently jailed under politically motivated charges—from entering the upcoming presidential race, thereby neutralizing the regime’s most formidable rival by forcing the opposition back under a defeated leader. ↩︎
