CLAUDIA KOONZ: GOP political theater vs. the truth of Jan. 6.

Republicans understand politics is war by other means, and that its ‘other means’ is theater. As national attention turns to the U.S. House Jan 6 hearings, their offstage antics escalate.

In November 1923 police fired on a raucous gang of about 2,000 insurgents in downtown Munich. Fourteen attackers and four policemen died. Hitler and eight comrades were charged with high treason. A guilty verdict could have meant years in prison and, in Hitler’s case, long-term deportation to his home country Austria.

Hitler transformed a crushing defeat into victory because sympathetic Bavarian judges allowed him to take center stage with a big lie. While his co-defendants pleaded not guilty, Hitler proudly took responsibility for the treasonous debacle. For 24 days he raged, often for hours at a time, against the “Jewish-Marxist criminals” whose surrender to Allied armies in 1918 had been the “greatest disgrace in German history.”

His narrative converted treason against the democracy he despised into an act of courage. “Even if you [judges] find us guilty a thousand times over, the goddess of the eternal tribunal of history will smilingly tear apart the … sentence of the Court because she will acquit us.” He did not have to await the verdict of history. Hitler’s paltry five-year sentence was commuted before the next Christmas. Hitler gloated that the trial had, “enormously increased people’s enthusiasm.” It made him an international celebrity.

In the following years, while ordinary politicians debated policy, Joseph Goebbels explained Nazis’ new strategy for war against the government they despised. “We will use democracy to destroy democracy.” But while outrageous lies and sporadic terror solidified the Nazi hard core, the Weimar Republic stood firm. Voters, with turnout rates above 80 percent, cast less than 3 percent of their ballots for Nazi candidates. Then, with the onset of the Great Depression, unemployment climbed to 33 percent. Political gridlock paralyzed the government.  In five national elections from 1931-32, voters shifted from moderate to extreme parties, and the Nazi vote increased to over 30 percent.

Facing fractious opponents, the Nazi Party escalated its violence, fraud and libel --- crimes that became virtues in its imagined war for survival against a fictitious “Judeo-Communist” conspiracy.

Four months may be too little time to complete an unhindered Department of Justice prosecution, and state and local elected officials may manage to steal the November election.

What will history say about an attorney general who visited Ukraine to endorse the hunt for Russian war criminals but FAILED to prosecute the criminal conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 election?