It was a cool, dark night in Berlin on May 10, 1933, as a mob of white Nazi college students pulled thousands of “subversive” books off a large truck bed and threw them into the middle of the Opernplatz, a large public square to the west of the State Opera building. They hurled into the pile works by Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Hermann Hesse, Eduard Bernstein, Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich, and any book that they could find and steal that didn’t directly support Nazi ideology and that encouraged any kind of free thinking.
As the “un-German” books, many written by Germans, went up in flames on what was later renamed the Bebelplatz, their leader and ideological idol Joseph Goebbels provided the inspirational soundtrack. Hitler’s favorite general fanned the flames of hatred for the supposed inferior “untermenschen”—or subhumans—as the crowd of white students raised their hands into a Nazi salute with ashes floating upward between their fingers.
“No to decadence and moral corruption!” Goebbels, born a Catholic, preached to his choir. “Yes to decency and morality in family and state!” Then the Nazi chief propagandist—who bore a striking resemblance to Donald Trump’s ideological adviser Stephen Miller—carried on:
“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path. … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you, as a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death. This is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.”
Hitler soon promoted Goebbels, who would serve as the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933 until 1945 when he and his whole family would swallow poison as the Allies advanced toward their bunker. The little führer had handpicked Goebbels to succeed him as chancellor, a term that would last a whole day.
Goebbels used his writing and communications skills, and vicious schemes, to work to destroy any vestige of free press and individual thought in Hitler’s Nazi empire. The Nazis controlled all channels of communication, destroying those that criticized them in any way—from newspapers to radio to books to arts and film. Goebbels led the efforts to remove all Jews and other targeted groups, including anyone considered an “intellectual,” from any position of influence, eventually helping send many to their deaths. He helped produce a film, “The Eternal Jew,” in 1940 and created documentaries to promote Nazis’ supposed superiority and spread hatred of the other. He also took over control of all radio stations in the country.
“He … has combined all the newspaper, radio, publications and art activities in Germany into one vast propaganda machine,” American ambassador William E. Dodd said of Goebbels in 1934.
With his way with words, Goebbels succeeded brilliantly in his quest to shape fellow Germans of the time into compliant, bigoted beasts; it was Goebbels who urged superior countrymen to engage in “spontaneous demonstrations” against Jews. This led to the violent and pivotal Kristallnacht on Nov. 9-10, 1938, with roving mobs destroying 900 synagogues and almost 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses while killing 91 Jews.
Kristallnacht was the first Nazi mass roundup with 30,000 Jewish men transferred to concentration camps. By 1941, camps were filled with Jews, Roma (disparagingly known as Gypsies to this day), gay men, intellectuals, communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet soldiers and various political prisoners—with many countries including the U.S. enforcing strict quotas on how many refugees they would accept. That year, Goebbels urged his bossman to engage the “Final Solution” of extermination.
Goebbels, in fact, used his propaganda machine to proclaim publicly and proudly that “the Jews will pay with extermination of their race,” the U.S. Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia teaches. The German people, including their children who were raised as Hitler Youth (boys) and the League of German Girls to drink all the hateful Kool-Aid, would also pay dearly over time for believing what monsters told them about their neighbors and immigrants from other countries.
Leading up to the “Final Solution” in 1942, Hitler and his weird, creepy, mass-murderous generals from Goebbels to Heinrich Himmler to Hermann Göring and others were obsessed with removing “the enemy within” and “Jewish poison” not just from Germany, but from existence.
Any of these words sound familiar now? I know too much about history to believe in coincidences.
A Holocaust Fertilized by Denialism
What too many of us don’t know now is that the rise of Nazi Germany and the lead-up to the Holocaust was a slow play fertilized by denialism about what was happening in plain view—not the Final Solution out of the gate. Non-targeted Germans continued their daily lives, even as their kids trained to be hardened and hateful Nazis, and believed the bigoted lies that it was “subhuman” people—which is not a thing—causing all their economic problems.
In 11 days, we are at serious risk of history getting the call to repeat itself here in the U.S. against millions of immigrants—not to mention the free press, “intellectuals” (which here just means too smart to be a fascist), political opponents, LGBTQ people and other supposed enemies within, to use the words of both Hitler and Trump. We are forced to listen to those spewing Goebbels-esque language today as they blame Black and Brown people or some other “other” for every damn thing, starting with their own misery and unhappiness.
Until the Allies finally showed up, Hitler’s reign succeeded due to just such propaganda and the animalization of human beings designed to inflame supposedly “Aryan” citizens of Germany and then other counties into buying in—or at least turning their heads. Too many people inside and increasingly outside Germany bought the rhetoric and believed the Nazis would make their lives better, or at least that they wouldn’t be targeted because of their skin tone.
That naive blindness to how evil always metastasizes led to appeasement of the Third Reich, including in France and The Netherlands, at least until Hitler sent his goons and bombers after the appeasers—regardless of how lily white and compliant they were. I will never forget visiting Kamp Westerbork transit camp in The Netherlands last spring where Jewish families were sent to live in the woods supposedly for their protection, with fellow Dutch folk guarding them. Then trains would arrive and load up unsuspecting adults and children—including sisters Anne and Margot Frank—on the way to their deadly final destinations in full-blown concentration camps. The Frank girls then died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Northern Germany in early 1945 and were buried in mass graves.
Is this human-vs.-human shell game really what we want America to become as Trump and his sidekick J.D. Vance and strategists like Stephen Miller and the other so-called “generals” round up millions of, as they are now promising, both legal and undocumented immigrants? Are we really OK as a people with watching our neighbors packed into camps while 21st-century fascists try to figure out where to send them? Meantime, other countries will likely reject mass influxes of people just as the U.S. did during the Nazi reign, and it’s déjà vu all over again.
Do we want an administration that will deputize Americans to guard fellow human beings in camps just because they have the gall to migrate into this country of mostly immigrants and their offspring? We’ve already watched this mess degrade to the point that anti-immigrant media figures are telling us it’s no big deal that Donald Trump bragged to his decorated general-turned-chief of staff John Kelly that he admired Hitler’s goon-squad leaders.
Now we’re sitting in a nation where major legacy newspapers are suddenly being told from on high that they can’t endorse the not-fascist nominee for president after so many months of watching supposedly impressive news outlets both-sides the reality out of what’s at stake and what these people just really may do if Trump gets back into office. As a nonprofit news outlet, the Mississippi Free Press is not allowed to endorse candidates, but it’s been a long, long tradition in for-profit outlets such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
We’re even told not to believe the goofy old tan man when he says, repeatedly, that he wants to use the military against American political opponents. Pshaw, we’re told.
‘On Tyranny: Do Not Obey In Advance’
I spent several hours in the U.S. Holocaust Museum last Sunday in Washington, D.C. I read placards showing the appalling percentages of Americans—led by uber-racist Charles Lindbergh and his “America First” friends—who wanted us to stay out of Hitler’s business over there, and who didn’t even want us to take in Jewish children to save their little lives.
The exhibit that stood out to me the most was the model replica of a crematorium gas chamber complex showing where the adults and children were led to often right after arriving on the trains. It showed the “Final Solution” chamber where they were stripped, then gassed to their deaths, then the one where camp workers drilled the gold fillings out of their mouths and cut off all the women’s hair and took their jewelry. Their bodies were then dragged and burned on pyres, in furnaces or in pits.
Nothing morally corrupt in any of that, generals. Or at least Goebbels and comrades would tell us that. They were just taking out the garbage, to borrow from Trump’s dehumanizing language about the immigrants he despises this week.
As I stared at the white gas-chamber replica, I thought about what it takes to be this evil. My conclusion: When you’re the type who thinks that certain people are subhuman animals, as Trump and Vance have indicated repeatedly about Black and Brown immigrants with lies about eating cats and whatnot, history shows that you don’t give a damn about the horrors inflicted on the so-called “vermin” you abhor and want gone.
You hate them, so you hurt them … badly. That was true in my hometown in 1964, and it was true in Germany in 1941, and it’s still true today. Too many supposedly superior people are still raised to gleefully believe this is the way.
The way to hell, maybe.
Last November, I spent a day in the Resistance and Deportation History Center in the former Gestapo headquarters in Lyon, France, reading about the brave French folk facing almost-sure death for standing up against the Nazis on behalf of their fellow citizens and to try to take their country back. A lot of them, men and women, published and distributed illegal resistance newspapers, and a good number of them were shot in ditches or put on trains to one or another concentration camp never to be seen again.
As I stood looking at an actual printing press they used, I understood that resistance was the only choice. What is life without freedom?
But even as their country’s sold-out Vichy leadership appeased and assisted Hitler and them generals as Charles de Gaulle hid in England to help direct the fight to reclaim their country, the everyday resisters stood up as they did in villages and cities across Europe and in Africa. They showed courage; they believed in humanity; and they refused to give up their freedom without a fight to the death if necessary.
Today, we’re all witnessing courage, but not so much inside media executive suites that seem to think they have to pre-appease Trump in case he wins and Vance in case he ascends.
My fellow Mississippian Stuart Stevens, once a political strategist for Republicans and now with the Lincoln Project, tweeted earlier today that the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times “are violating rule 1 of Timothy Snyder’s warnings ‘On Tyranny.’”
That rule: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
This advance compliance happened in Nazi Germany and appeasing European countries that thought they could survive or even benefit and thrive from Nazi friendships, and that allowed Hitler and his generals and the authoritarian leaders Trump admires so much today to just take step after step after step into the abyss. The Nazi train had rolled early with softer activities like staging raucous book burnings across Germany, and moved to terrorism against local Jews and destruction of their businesses, to removal of families and detractors to camps, to meticulously designing and contracting to build gas chambers, to collecting gold fillings and wedding rings before burning millions of corpses.
If you know me, you know I can’t stand partisan politics. But I and our journalism team at the Mississippi Free Press will stand in the breach to report the truth and support humanity and freedom as long as possible no matter what happens on Election Day. Kimberly Griffin and I did not start the MFP nearly five years ago to lie down as democracy is destroyed or to help drive the damn fascism tanks that will destroy free thought and a free press. I’m shocked that any U.S. media outlet would. Silence is acquiescence when you trade in words.
I will continue to fight fascism and for humanity and freedom with my words and knowledge of history because it’s the tools I have and know. As I tweeted earlier today, “if you don’t have the balls to challenge fascism, then don’t run a newsroom.”
There is no freedom without a free press and access to ideas beyond hate. And freedom is not real if we’re not willing to fight for it.
Read Donna Ladd’s full Democracy essay series here.
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