Editor’s note: In honor of what would have been Donald W. Krueger’s 88th birthday today, we reprint one of his pieces today.
By Donald Krueger
Having trouble remembering? Could it be that evolution in a few generations will have us with built-in, pre-programmed personal digital assistant-type things?
In the meantime, we’re stuck with our old-fashioned calendars, which, depending on your and advertisers’ choices, may or may not remind us of those special days and weeks we’re supposed to remember each month.
Noticeably missing from April this year in all the American-made calendars I’ve seen is the Holocaust Remembrance Day/Month. As if we should forget the six million Jews killed by Germans before and
during World War II, not in combat or because of crimes or sins, but simply because they were Jews. Eliminationist anti-Semitism. Genocide. Six million.
The Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds us of how the insanity of hate can infect an entire society. Read Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust.”
HE takes care of the myth that Germany’s general population was ignorant of the mass extermination of Jews and other “undesirables,” that it was the SS only that did the slaughtering, unwillingly, they said.
It is ironic that The Holocaust Remembrance Day should be in April – the month in 1945 that Allied armies discovered and liberated the German concentration and extermination camps – the month of Easter and Good Friday.
This especially given the Roman Church’s historic anti-Semitism and the support both Catholic and Protestant churches, their officials and congregations gave to the hunting and killing of Jews. Good Christians, all…they said.
You may recall Hitler saying that Germany was a Christian nation and that God was on its side.
Man created in God’s image?
So, that was then. It won’t happen again. It can’t happen here. Or can it? Should we have a Martin Luther Day on our calendars? He depicted Jews as a “plague, a pestilence, pure misfortune in our Germany.”
Germans should “burn all synagogues, destroy Jewish dwellings, confiscate the Jews’ holy books…” His “Concerning the Jews and Their Lies” became practically a do-it-yourself guide to genocide… and the religious justification for it.
“Without Christian anti-Semitism, The Holocaust would have been inconceivable.” (“Why the Jews: the Reason for Anti-Semitism,” Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.) “From the fourth to the eighteenth century its (the Roman Church) laws against the Jews were Europe’s laws.”
In his “Destruction of the Jews,” Raul Hilberg shows the Nazis’ copying of Church anti-Semitic laws. The Church did not (quite) advocate mass extermination of the “people of whom Christ said its father was the devil.” Jesus was a Jew. Would he have survived the extermination camps? Maybe the Nazis would have made him a Kapo.
Should we add a Reverend (he says) Fred Phelps Day to the April calendar, lest we forget his and his Baptist congregation parading at military funerals with signs: “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates Fags”?
The Germans included homosexuals among the “undesirables” to be exterminated.
Or a day for Charles Alan Wilson: “This great country that believes in God and guns…I hope somebody kills you” (this to Washington Senator Patty Murry) and “I hope somebody kills [the president]. Yes, die, dead.”
Don’t forget Sarah Palin and her moose rifle.
It can’t happen here? A recent poll shows 24 percent of Americans consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement; 90 percent of those are white. Didn’t say how many were Christians. Hitler’s National Socialist Party (Nazi) was in the minority, even as he was named Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
Another poll as two-third of Americans believing Obama is a socialist; 57 percent that he is Muslim, one in four suspect he is the Antichrist.
How many believe The Holocaust never happened? There is a resurgence of private militias and “patriot groups” – from 149 in 2008 to 512 today. Hate speech is becoming common, everyday talk.
Did you ever watch or listen to Hitler’s speeches? Didn’t need to know the language to see and hear the irrational emotion and hate pouring forth. Words into actions: In the same year he was made Chancellor, Dachau was established; Buchenwald in 1937.
Boycotts against Jews began in 1933. The anti-Semitic Nurenberg Laws passed in 1935. Jews lose their civil rights and citizenship. Nov. 9, 1938, was Kristallnact – the Night of Broken Glass – anti-Semitic riots and destruction of synagogues, Jewish businesses and institutions. The Einsatagruppen (mobile killing units) to follow the German army for the express purpose of killing Jews and other “undesirables.” 1941: Goering instructs Heydrich to carry out the “final solution to the Jewish question…”
It took a few years. It can’t happen here? Newsweek editor Jon Meachan says, “Words matter, for extreme rhetoric creates a climate in which those on the fringe may threaten, or even take, extreme measures, and that way madness lies… (T)hese are real threats in real time – in our time.”
Not only from adults, so-called. Words mattered to Phoebe Prince, the 15-year-old Irish teen who hanged herself after being verbally bullied by her classmates on Facebook.
Germany had the Hitler Youth. Kid bullies grow up – but not their emotions – to be adult bullies. Thanks to Courier columnist Jim Coufal for bringing the problems of bullies in our schools to the front. I hope we’ll read in the future of issues of measures school officials, and most importantly parents, are taking to cure the infection.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to be thankful my paternal grandfather emigrated from Germany…even if…
Donald W. Krueger of Cazenovia is a retired professor and active contrarian. Readers can email him at madnews@m3pmedia.com.
Don Krueger’s column, “It Can’t Happen here?” is a powerful call for thought and action, putting voice to philosopher George Santayana’s famous maxim, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Don might also have rightfully titled his remarks “Lest We Forget.” It is in this latter spirit my remarks below are made.
Without at all downplaying the heinous crimes of the holocaust, the murder of nearly 6 million Jews during the holocaust, what often gets overlooked is the “others” who were killed by the Nazis. Killed like the Jews in crematoria, by shooting squads, by hanging and garroting, by overwork and starvation, individually and en mass. Who were they? Don mentions homosexuals; add transvestites, Roma (gypsies), mentally and physically disabled; add Muslims, Christians, socialists, communists, and whoever else displeased Hitler.
Most of these others were Christians and most were Polish. Just prior to the invasion of Poland Hitler authorized his commanders to kill “without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language,” and shortly thereafter Hienrich Himmler declared “It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles.” The danger in so noting the huge destruction of Polish people is to downplay the death of so many others. Yet, of the 5 million “others”, 3 million were Polish Christians, mostly Catholics. Over 2,600 Catholic monks and priests were killed and another 2,600 priests were sent to concentration camps. The Pope’s refusal to condemn the annexation of Poland and the attendant murders was seen as a betrayal by many Polish Catholics.
Don’s column title could also be rephrased as “Can it happen here?” Again, without making a direct comparison to the holocaust, I suggest it has happened here. It was called slavery, where blacks, like the Jews of Hitler’s thought, were considered less than human and property. Hitler built on longstanding, Christian inspired anti-Semitism. We still have the after effects of slavery; it’s called racism. Sometimes it’s disguised as patriotism, but its racism wrapped in the flag.
Can it happen here? In a lesser form, it’s happening. Perhaps George Bernard Shaw had it correct when he said, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”