There is a tremendous irony in the fact that the nation that betrayed its intelligence and inflicted the Holocaust on the world has also been one of the best at repenting its past evil.
During his term in office, former President Donald Trump (of German descent) said he thought Germany had been punished enough for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich and should no longer have to do penance for it.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Trump he was wrong in no uncertain terms. She said what Germany did back then wasn’t just a crime that could just be apologized for and forgiven, it was a truly horrific thing.
American conservatives love to say that Hitler may have been bad but Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong were worse, but the thing they always ignore was that both Stalin and Mao ran countries with huge populations of uneducated peasants.
Germans were the most educated people in Europe if not the world.
In the wonderful 1961 movie “Judgement at Nuremburg” about the war crimes trials after World War II, one thing that almost beggars belief is how many Germans insisted they had no idea what Hitler was doing to the Jews.
In one scene, Spencer Tracy’s judge is speaking with an aristocratic German widow played by Marlene Dietrich. She insists she never knew.
Mrs. Bertholt: I saw Mr. Perkins today. He told me they’d showed those pictures in the courtroom. Col. Lawson’s favorite pictures. He drags them out at any pretext, doesn’t he? Col. Lawson’s private chamber of horrors. Is that what you think we are? Do you think we knew of those things? Do you think we wanted to murder women and children? Do you believe that? Do you?
Judge Dan Haywood: Mrs. Bertholt, I don’t know what to believe.
Mrs. Bertholt: Good God. We’re sitting here drinking. How could you think that we knew? We did not know. We did not know!
Judge Dan Haywood: As far as I can make out, no one in this country knew.
Of course they knew. They were too intelligent and too well-informed not to know, and with Hitler raving about Germans being rtrhe Master Race in his speeches, they knew more than they wanted to know. In fact, they were smarter and better educated than most of the people we now call Trumpanzees.
Modern-day Germans have one thing over Trump’s followers. They don’t rave about Hitler’s “good qualities” and they don’t display swastikas. You don’t see many Trump rallies without Confederate battle flags or swastikas. Trump’s followers hate our country for what it is.
We have gone way past the happy medium on the question of rights and responsibilities. We have the right to carry guns, so of course we have misfits armed with automatic weapons for their trips to Walmart. We protect the rights of average folks to own guns but we do little or nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, abusers and the mentally ill.
You want irony? Well, our modern-day gunslingers like to pretend they’re in the wild west, but western cities like Dodge City and Abilene confiscated guns of anyone coming into town and returned their weapons to them when they left.
It is truly strange and truly sad that of all the so-called civilized nations in the world, America probably has more Nazis and more love for Hitler than anyone else.
Especially with Trump sounding more and more authoritarian and talking of how immigrants are poisoning our American blood, I’ll guarantee one thing.
When it does happen here, the people who made it possible will not be able to say they did not know.