Kevin Williamson, a right wing propagandist for National Review, claims Bernie Sanders is a Nazi. Really.
I think it's time we took Mr. Williamson and the rest of that bunch on a virtual tour of Konzentrationslager Mauthausen, with none other than Hank Himmler, known to Hitler as der treue Heinrich (rough translation: "jus' a good ol' boy") as a tour guide.
You can be the judge -- is Bernie Sanders really a Nazi -- or is Kevin Williamson another cheap-ass Holocaust denier/minimizer along the lines of David Irving?
Mauthausen concentration camp was located about 10 miles east of the Austrian city of Linz, Hitler's adopted home town, on the north side of the Danube river. It was run by the arch-Nazi organization called the SS, run by Himmler since before the Nazi takeover. There is a remarkable collection of images available at Wiki Commons which show Himmler and his staff visiting Mauthausen camp and quarry, on at least two occasions, once in April 1941, and another time in June 1941
Unlike Hitler, who never so far as can be determined ever came near a concentration camp, Himmler toured a number of them. The SS plan was to exterminate, via forced labor various minorities, disfavored groups, and conquered nations, through the construction of the physical plant of a state within a state, or perhaps more accurately an international racist organization.
Image 1: Leading Nazis tour Mauthausen, April 1941.
Himmler intended Mauthausen to be a castle-like headquarters for the SS. The construction of the citadel employed the slave labor of thousands of persons incarcerated at Mauthausen, which, although it was not purely a killing center such as Treblinka, was still well capable of working or starving prisoners to death.
Mauthausen was located near an existing commercial quarry, and the SS profited from leasing out slave labor to the construction firms which worked the quarry. An access road was built from the main camp down to the edge of the quarry, where access to the quarry floor was made by a set of 186 rough-hewn granite steps.
Prisoners were forced to carry large blocks of stone up the steps, and if they fell, which was common, they would kill or seriously injure themselves and others on the steps, which became as the “stairs of death”.
Image 1 is a photograph originally taken at Mauthausen by an SS photographer, probably someone on Himmler’s staff, and probably showing the April 1941 visit.
This shows, on the road leading down to the quarry, in the front (left to right), four leading Nazis, all war criminals and Holocaust perpetrators: Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Franz Ziereis (Mauthausen camp commandant), Himmler, and August Eigruber, wearing the black SS uniform, a wannabe Hitler who like many of his fellow toadies aped the Hitler upper lip decoration.
All four would die inglorious deaths, Kaltenbrunner and Eigruber by hanging, Himmler by suicide to avoid the same fate.
Ziereis, a particularly odious creep, would be "shot while trying to escape" and following his death, his naked body hung on the camp's barbed wire, with swastikas painted on the buttocks.
Does one see an elderly Jewish socialist among these skunks? I don't think so. But let's be clear: these are the people with whom Kevin Williamson ranks Bernie Sanders.
Image 2: SS officers on Mauthausen quarry floor, June 1941. Identifiable:
Eigruber, Himmler, Oswald Pohl, Paul Hansen, Franz Kutschera
(face blocked, just behind Himmler) and Wilhelm Bittrich.
Image 2 shows SS officers touring the quarry. This happened in early June, 1941, after the German war machine had crushed, in a matter of a few hours, the feeble armed forces of Yugoslavia, and, in a few weeks, overwhelmed the Greeks. Instrumental in this aggression was the SS mechanized division called
Das Reich, which I suppose means "Empire" in English.
Himmler loved to think of his own concentration camp system as the waging of war by a different means, and he took every chance he could to attempt to merge the two concepts as a single war upon external and internal enemies. Following the Yugoslav campaign, Himmler invited a whole bunch of the Das Reich officers up to Mauthausen for a tour of the place. Also tagging along were the usual Nazi hacks, such as Kaltenbrunner and Eigruber, who had accompanied Himmler on the April inspection.
And what a gallery of thugs we have in Image 2.
On the far left, in front, is a man wears a blank black color tab, for Gestapo, and the inverted chevron, showing he was a Nazi party member before the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, in 1933, or, if he is Austrian, before the Anschluss in 1938.
A bit to the right is a man wearing a light (actually a brown Nazi party uniform) jacket, a white shirt and a black tie: this is "Gauleiter" (i.e. chief thug) Friedrich Rainer (1903-1947), who was handed over to the Yugoslavs after the war, sentenced to death for his many crimes in that country, and, apparently, executed.
To Himmler’s right in Image 2 is a Nazi with a big grin on his face, this is Oswald Pohl (1892-1951), the financial manager of the SS and, later, of the entire concentration camp system. Pohl was an accountant by trade, and a damn good one.
When the Nazis shifted over into full extermination mode, in early 1942, through killing factories such as Treblinka, Pohl kept track of the false teeth, wedding rings, watches, currency, furs, eyeglasses, shoes, and so forth of the millions of men, women and children killed in these centers.
Pohl was fortunate enough to escape capture for some time after the war, and when he was finally caught he claimed that it was the conveniently dead Himmler who was really to blame. Now little known, Pohl did not receive a pardon as did so many of his comrades in murder, and eventually the smiling bookkeeper of 1941 suffered the full sentence of tod durch den strang.
In between Pohl and Himmler, and a little behind can be seen a man wearing a white shirt, black tie, and military cap, this is Peter Adolf Caesar Hansen (1896 - 1967), a national of Chile, who went to Germany as a young man, and later became an ardent Nazi and one of the high ranking officers in the military arm of the SS. The tall man to Himmler’s right with the bandage on his left hand is Wilhelm Bittrich (1894-1979), an SS combat commander.
Bittrich and Hansen, as soldiers, were able to put some distance between themselves and the concentration camp machinery, basically on the very familiar claim that they knew nothing about the Nazi regime in which they were ranked so high. Yet here they are at the heart of the concentration camp system.
Image 3: SS officers stride through Mauthausen quarry, June 1941.
Image 3 shows the June 1941 party striding confidently past the prisoners, apparently towards the stairs on the way back to the main camp. Wearing a long leather coat and striding confidently towards is
Franz Kutschera (1904-1944), a prominent Austrian Nazi, who was killed in an ambush by Polish partisans. A classic image of the Herrenvolk, as they imagined themselves.
Image 4: SS officers surmount Mauthausen quarry stairs, June 1941.
Image 4, taken shortly after Image 3, shows the same party walking up the infamous Stairs of Death. Note the prisoner standing at attention on the left. Imagine the arrogant thoughts running through the heads of those Nazis: "This isn't so bad, anybody can walk up these steps. What are those untermensch complaining about?"
These are the real Nazis. Do any of them remind you of an elderly Jewish senator from a small New England state? The truth is that when someone makes this kind of comparison, they are diminishing the real crimes of the Nazis, which I consider to be a form of Holocaust denial.