Rainer Pitthan: Liz Cheney, a proto-fascist if I ever have seen one, shamelessly uses 6 Million Victims of the NS Murder Machine to try to besmirch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).
https://bit.ly/2ZQg1Sk
Following Hannah Arendt’s observation of the bureaucratic banality of evil, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has probably best organized the phases from Concentration Camps to Death Camps in the NS time. Their orders are this way:
We are obviously not, yet, in the 1942-1945 frame. So where are we in the proto-fascism actions and preparations of the Republicans in Congress, culmination to actions, during the Trump Presidency? And how may it end for Americans, as evidenced not only for the Jews and Poles, and Romanis and …, but also for the Germans?
What even the Holocaust Museum misses is the run-up to 1933. Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, under executive power by President General Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, did not come out of blue sky. It started with Joseph Goebbels as parliamentary speaker of the NSDAP from 1928 on explicitly making sure (together with the communists and the Catholic Zentrum Party), that (a) the Reich’s Government would not have economic success in fighting the Great Depression (an appropriate 2008+ marker might be the stated Republican maxim: “most important thing for the nation is to keep Obama to one-year term”, when the economy was bleeding 800,000 jobs a month), and (b) the takeover of the Prussian Government (including the Judicial and Police Administration) by National Socialists on July 20, 1932 (called the Preußenschlag) (an appropriate marker here is the takeover of the DoJ by Republican Party Zealots like Bill Barr in 2018).
We also see the equivalent of Robert Murdoch in Alfred Hugenberg, who by 1932 owned much of the German newspapers.
It started slow, similar to the takeover of DoJ, which made justice from the Mueller Report impossible, or to use a metaphor ICE loves to use: it tied Mueller’s hands behind his back. Here the SS excitedly wrote in the “Schwarze Fahne” the week after President Hindenburg’s death in 1934, that finally their hands were no longer tied to go after WW1 Veteran Jews, which had been protected by Hindenburg. Interestingly to nore, that Hitler’s Chef de Companie, who proposed him for EK2 and EK1, was Jewish. And Hitler protected him, the good Jew he knew, despite Goebbel’s warning against the weakness of “everybody knows a good Jew”.
The Prussian take-over 1932 could have / should have prevented by a General Strike, but the Unions were fighting each other. In particular the catholic worker unions and their party, the Zentrum Party, were sympathetic to Hitler. After the Reichstag Fire in March of 1933 the NS Authorities in Prussia used that power to jail communist deputies to parliament. Since the NSDAP had only gotten 37% of the votes (and, therefore, in the German proportionality election law only 37% of the deputies) this still was not enough for approving the Empowerment Law which gave Hitler the power to override laws. Except the Catholic Zentrum voted for it and so it passed — reminds you of the despicable role of American evangelical so-called Christians in supporting the authoritarian Trump and his illegal maneuvers. The name of the main catholic instigator in 1933, a Prelate Klaar, shall be damned in eternity.
The pay-off for the Catholic Church was the Concordate (German-Vatican Treaty) of July 20, 1933. The concordat gave moral legitimacy to the NS regime soon after Hitler had acquired quasi-dictatorial powers through the Enabling Act of 1933, an Act itself facilitated through the support of the Catholic Zentrum Party, as described above. The Holy See became the first legal partner to Hitler's regime.
Today European Christian Theologians, trained in the rigor of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s evangelical doctrine, which took much impetus from Kant’s Ethical Imperative, compare the failures of the German Catholic Church and the actions of the Zentrum, to the abominable stand of Evangelical Christians in the US, with respect to personal immoral actions and statements by Candidate and President Trump .
This soft start in 1932-1934 run-up was in my opinion what, on June 17 of 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) (D-NY) referring to, when she wrote: “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border….. ‘If Never Again’ means something…we need to do something about it”.
Apart from the fact that US Concentration Camps, defined as extra-judicial holding facilities (meaning the Gestapo-like ICE-Police can incarcerate you there, without involving a judge, for an indeterminate time, and deport at will without access to a lawyer as a matter of course) do not only exist on the Southern Border, AOC is basically correct. It even doesn’t matter if your are Natural Born citizen, even a Veteran, ICE can deliver you to the deportation facilities and you are lost.
Many of the incarcerated Asylum seekers have US constitutional and international law rights, as I will show below. But these private facilities are on purpose far away from (often volunteer) legal counsel, which makes their imprisonment effectively extra-legal, which makes it effectively a concentration camp. Just to make clear: what the Gestapo did, was legal under the then existing laws, (legally) changed by Hitler. He did not even have to issue an executive order like Trump, a Fuehrerbefehl from June 1933 on, was legal. Many who followed this legal orders, were jailed and even hung by the Occupiers in Germany after 1946, often in accordance the Nuremberg War Criminal Process.
While AOC got much support from the younger members of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League ADL (among other Jewish organizations), right wing Republicans were quick to attack. In particular, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), an arch-type proto-fascist if I know one, waded in with great ignorance and malice, tweeting “Please…do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust.”
In fact it is Liz Cheney who should do us a favor and study the history of the 3rd Reich. She is ignorant and hateful toward Hispanic immigrants. I invite her to dislike Norwegian looking (the type Trump likes) Germans, tall, blond, blue-eyed immigrants, with degrees in Technical Nuclear Physics and Reactor Technology, and a background in political and legal studies as well.
Like most Germans of my generation (born 1940, the last generation conceived before the war, my parents would joke), I have been intensely educated in the topic of German History in the NS Area at least since 8th Grade in a German Gymnasium (=High School). I cannot count the times we marched the half mile to the local movie theater to watch war and holocaust movies. In our school it was even more intense, because our Director, a graduate of our former Grand Ducal A&M High School, as of most of our best teachers were , Dr. Wilhelm Holzapfel, had a Jewish wife and, therefore, after 1933 was not allowed to be a teacher. But as a gifted Mathematician he was recruited by Wernher von Braun and he and his wife became “untouchables” for the local SA ruffians.
After 1945 the US Forces installed him as Director of the local Gymnasium (High School), which, as the former Hessian Grand-Ducal A&M Gymnasium (Hoehere Landwitschaft Schule with its own experimental agricultural station), had a brilliant past and reputation in Science and Modern Languages. In the German High School system, unlike the US, courses go over many years; for example minor topics like Physics and Biology, and Chemistry, and History, and Sociology, and Art, and Music, and Sport, I each had twice a week from 8th to 13th grade. Holzapfel also instituted a course of 2 hours a week of Modern German History from 1871 to the 1950’s twice a week for grade 11th to 13th, with extensive coverage of the Third Reich. School Directors in Germany have the authority to do that. For the social studies for many years (and again for 2 hours a week) we had an older grizzled Social Democrat, Mr. Keim, who rounded off the picture of what had been going on under Hitler. This is the theoretical underpinning of my knowledge, creating an intellectual frame work which allowed me to incorporate more details for the rest of my life, where the number of details absorbed exploded with the advent of the Internet and time on hand after retirement from Stanford University.
On the more personal level, my uncle Bernd was incarcerated as a communist in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. He survived with the help of another uncle, Karl, a non-functionary NS-Party member, but with a NS-Party Number under 30,000, who made sure he regularly received food packages. These things are more complicated than apparent: In a romantic MAGA craze (Make Alemania Great Again) Karl had joined the NS-Party, a craze he shared, for example, with the Jewish Bankers Association (See article in the New York Times of August 8, 1933 [ https://nyti.ms/3me8QcR ]about a radio talk Rabbi Samuel Untermyer gave in May of 1933, upon returning from Germany). Since Karl had joined early (and thus was an Alter Kaempfer), he had an intimidating and door- opening Golden NS-Party lapel pin. Karl was a member of the Wandervogel and an admirer of Ernst Juenger. Like in the case of the Wandervogel Juenger, romantic impetus and patriotism drove him to join. You might want to Google the Wiki about Juenger and read through the events of Juenger’s 102 years of life.
In my father’s home town 4000 people before the war, the local NS Chairman, a teacher named Dr. Wilhelm Metzger, got the local milkman, Mr. Faerber, a convinced communist, out of the concentration camp. Several times, until finally friends and neighbors convinced Mr. Faerber that all the talk would not change the power of the NS Regime. If my uncle Uncle Bernd and Mr. Faerber would have been in a death camp, they would have been lost.
To round up my upbringing:
- In my graduating class of 20 there were 6 war orphans.
- One of them had to watch in 1945 Czech militia make his father dig a hole, were they put him and burned him alive.
- The 2 younger brothers of my father were killed on the Eastern front in 1943 and 1945,
- The husband of a close friend of parents only came back from being a 12-year Russian POW in 1955.
- The Jewish M.D. father of one of my best friends was forced to resettle from Estonia in 1939, under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, and since he spoke Russian, he was put into a Russian POW Camp as the camp Doctor, where he died of Typhus.
In 1973 I was able to be helpful to Robert H. Shumaker, the 2nd naval aviator shot down over Vietnam, when he choose to go for a PhD at the Naval Postgraduate School, by pointing him (and his wife) toward German medical experience with such long imprisonment, which had been made part of NATO expertise. Which apparently was not known to American military.
And then there was the endless stream of war widows, often with with many children, coming to my home town in 1945/46 , and being absorbed, so that the population grew from 4,000 to more than 6,000.
I am leaving out half a dozen other distinct traumatic experiences of my early youth. I don’t know much about the disgusting Liz Cheney, but when I was 12, I probably had more life experience than she in her whole life. Talking about this to British friends, they say ignore Liz Cheney, she is just an old cow. Ah, those British!
The most concise and admirable and factual description of the topic of Concentration Camps is on the website of the “Unite States Holocaust Memorial Museum”, see the URLs on the top. Like a few of the history teachers in Germany I had, who found it useful to augment the documented horrors with factual lies, creating resistance from us students, Liz Cheney is not doing the US nor the families of Holocaust victims any favor by spreading lies for political reasons. She is probably afraid of the rare raw political intelligence and competence of AOC.
I was very heavily involved in social democratic (SPD) politics in the Frankfurt area before I came 1973 for a year under a NATO Fellow Ship to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. I never went back, when in 1974 the National Science Foundation offered the School a 5-year personal grant for me. The political acumen and intelligence of AOC reminds me of the SPD politician Rosemarie Wiczorek-Zeul (Google!), who was 27 when I first met her in the SPD in 1968. She had many positions in the SPD, including President of the Young Socialists, deputy Chair of the SPD, and Deputy of the Vize-Chancellor, Governor of the Word Bank, and other functions. She also did an outstanding job as secretary for foreign aid, revamping the way the EU does Foreign Aid.
So, the murderous campaigns of NS-Germany came in phases. Following Hannah Arendt in her bureaucratic banality classification, the phase until the outbreak of WW2 in 1939 was not aiming on killing Jews, far from it. The NS Regime wanted to strip the Jews from their money and let them emigrate. The prisoners in the Concentration Camps in 1933 - 1939 were mostly Communists, Social Democrats, Trade Unionists, Jehovas Witnesses, opponents of an attempted protestant State Church (like Martin Niemoeller), and other political enemies. The numbers of incarcerated reflects this. It went up to about 45,000 in the mid-thirties, and by 1939 then the NS state felt secure, it had dropped to 7,500. No, most were not (yet) murdered, most were simply paroled.
But not Martin Niemoeller, the Reverend so well known for his poem: “First they came for the communists,---“. He was arrested in1937 for reading on Sundays in his Church in Berlin-Dahlem the names of all pastors of the confessing church who had been arrested. He was jailed in infamous Moabit Prison, tried and acquitted in May of 1938 with a 500 Reichs Mark fine and time served. That means, if you were tried in the judicial system, there still was a form of justice.
An infuriated Hitler declared him his personal prisoner, removed him from the judicial system, that is, he imprisoned him in the Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen, and then in Dachau in 1941, were he stayed until 1945. Extra-judicial, just like many undocumented immigrants, and sometimes citizen veterans, as we all know, just because somebody at ICE did not like their face or their attitude, who are being put in a “jail” 500 miles away in a desert away from (volunteer) lawyers..
Being Hitler’s personal prisoner ironically gave Niemoeller a certain amount of protection. On the one hand. On the other hand, the Authorities were especially furious because Niemoeller was a highly decorated WW1 U-Boat Captain repudiating the system, but then again guards were fearful of the long arm of the armed forces.
Niemoeller’s successor in Dahlem was Helmut Gollwitzer who continued reading the names of protestant reverends on Sundays. In his case the NS system just conscripted him to the Soviet front. He became a famous theologian after the war, but maybe the most mind shattering writing is his war correspodence with his Jewish Fiancee, Eva Bildt, whom he was not allowed to marry, and who committed suicide 1945.
Until 1939 the NS aim was “Juden raus” (out with the Jews). When I heard the Trump-inspired chant “send her back”, a cold tremble ran down my spine, because it sounded like Goebbels in the Sport Palast in Berlin, whipping the crowd into a “Juden raus” frenzy. Until 1941 it was relatively easy to get a German Exit Visa. It were the Anti-semites in the US (and other) embassies and consulates, and in Congress, who were the problem and are guilty for the death of many, including the 600 on the St. Louis 1939.
The “Juden raus” turned into “Judah verrecke” (kill the Jews) after 1940, when Hitler blamed the International Jewry for the “Aryan Brother Nation” Britannia taking the sides of the Poles. “ They will pay for it”, we know he screamed.
Like Hannah Arendt describes it as the bureaucratic “banality of evil”: the wild “free-for all”, run by the local SA ruffians , Concentration Camps of the first year (Google “Concentration Camp Osthofen” for a typical example in English!) were brought under centralized “orderly” bureaucratic control in 1934.
To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez, maybe helped with the moral backing of the ADL, doubled down on her statement in the face of the opposition, explaining two days later “These camps…fit squarely in an academic consensus and definition” of concentration camps, keeping the controversy active and further fueling the expanding public debate. She was careful from the beginning to differentiate between the much broader term “concentration camps” and the narrower term “death camps.”
There is a “proper” Arendt-banal bureaucratic differentiation between Death Camp and Concentration Camp. What Liz Cheney belittles as an “only academic difference” made a large difference for the incarcerated: life and death. Ask my local milk dealer, Mr. Faerber, and my uncle Bernd Abendroth. On the scale of evil I rank Cheney’s “just-academic-diatribe” on par with Goebbels “Everybody knows a Good Jew“ (but get over it).
AOC has not shifted the conversation, the proto fascists like Liz Cheney have, by grandly telling the child AOC to go and study the issue, when the child had done her study and was right. I recommend go and read the definition of proto—fascist.
So Liz Cheney, where are we in comparison to the beginning of the 3rd Reich, and the Goebbels-like attacks on Asylum seekers? I think in 1932-34, and not 1945 when Millions had been slaughtered. Hindenburg is not yet dead, that is, ACA has not been invalidated, despite a Trumpian effort. ICE is happy for their hands being untied so that they get more brown people out.
To be clear: What enrages me are the proto-fascists who grandly hide behind the 6 Million murdered to get a swipe at AOC, who is trying to change the unconstitutional and demeaning treatment of adults, and the criminal treatment of children. The ignoramuses of the Republican party have no idea what this does to the image of the US in Europe. In Germany there is no majority anymore supporting the use of troops in Afghanistan. Confidence in the US President has dropped from 86% to 10%.
To repeat: We are not in 1945 when 6 Million had been killed, mostly in Extermination Camps, we are in 1932/34 when the Nazi grabbed the instruments of power. But it started in 1928 with the NSDAP in parliament refused to vote for any, any budget which would help the economy. No success for the Chancellor. It reminds me of many statements of the Republican Mitch McConnell and his cohorts about the need to keep Obama to one term, when we were bleeding 800,000 jobs a month. A month!
First the NS-Party grabbed the Power in 1932 in Prussia (2/3 of Germany), and then using the police power of Prussia to jail communists’ after the Reichstag fire. Grabbing the police power in Prussia is not dissimilar to the Trump Administration subverting the independent role of the Department of Justice with Mr. Bill Barr, as we saw with the Mueller Report (the King is above the law the AG says) and now with the Whistle Blower topic (nothing to see here, the AG says again). You cannot investigate the President for any imaginable crime. Impeach him if you dare! The iron Front of Republican Senators will not crumble. But eventually Bill Barr should and will end up in jail, I hope. Like Nixon’s AG John Mitchell for crimes committed during Watergate.
Ad to this the call of the King to jail Adam Schiff, the claim that investigating misdeeds of the president is analogue to “lynching”, continuing separation of children from their parents (claiming Asylum seeking is illegal), and there should be a cold trickle down your spine.
I could go on for dozens of pages but just let me conclude with 2 quotes (which you easily can Google):
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, hitting back at some of Ocasio-Cortez’ critics. “Looking at Holocaust history — thoughtfully, carefully — can help us to see the parallels between then and now,” she wrote.
And Jewish historian Anna Lind-Guzik wrote on Vox that the comparison “is not just appropriate, it’s necessary.” https://bit.ly/2z2Pik0