My father survived the Holocaust. Censorship didn’t stop the Nazis, it helped them

CBS host Margaret Brennan's view of the Holocaust is all wrong. She claimed that Germany weaponized free speech. The daughter of a survivor knows censorship helped the Nazis.

The speaking ban on Hitler led to posters depicting him as a free speech martyr, with his mouth taped shut and the text complaining that "He alone of two billion people on Earth may not speak in Germany."  Nadine Strossen is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE); a past national president of the American Civil Liberties Union; John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law, Emerita, New York Law School; and the author of "HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship" and "Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know." She is also featured in the documentary series "Free to Speak." 

In fairness to Brennan, she was repeating an all too common assumption: that the Nazis rose to power during Germany’s Weimar Republic because of its tolerance of their hateful rhetoric. But the historical record belies this assumption, which is why it is often called the "Weimar fallacy."