Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Creators: In 1933, Germany's Chancellor Began To Undermine Government Institutions. Thus Was Born a Dictator

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
October 21, 2024

Nearly 80 years ago, at the outset of the Battle of the Bulge, during the final months of World War II, the Nazi Waffen-SS massacred 84 U.S. Army prisoners of war. The massacre was committed in Belgium near the town of Malmedy. After the American POWs surrendered, they were corralled on to a farm field and gunned down by Nazi machine guns.

The Nazi officers at Malmedy were tried and convicted as part of a series of war crime trials after WWII.

Throughout the years following WWII, there have been Nazi apologists. For instance, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who in the 1950s infamously searched for communists on every street corner, expressed his concern about what he called the abuse of the "clearly innocent GI Joes of the German army."

McCarthy seized upon the Malmedy Massacre to castigate the American military for defaming the Nazis. Ironically, McCarthy accused the U.S. military of conducting a witch hunt.

In 2017, we watched as an American president defended white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, saying there are "some very fine people on both sides."

Recently, Tucker Carlson hosted a two-hour podcast with Darryl Cooper, a Nazi apologist. According to Jacob Heilbrunn writing in Politico, Cooper claims that "Winston Churchill, not Adolf Hitler, was the 'chief villain of the Second World War' and that the Holocaust was essentially an accident."

It is difficult to grasp that a "mainstream" American political movement could embrace or defend Nazism. The Nazis started WWII, killed 6 million Jews during the Holocaust and were responsible for widespread looting, plunder and countless atrocities like Malmedy.

The Nazi party grew as an under-the-radar fringe party, often ignored or shrugged off as meaningless. The Nazi party grew into a mass movement in the late 1920s and early 1930s by promoting fanatical nationalism and antisemitism.

In 1933, Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi party soon began to undermine rights of citizens and electoral politics. Soon, Hitler evolved from chancellor to dictator.

With the start of WWII, the Nazis ramped up the anti-Jewish rhetoric and increased the systematic slaughter of Jews. After invading and occupying Poland, the Nazis murdered thousands of Polish Jews. They confined many to ghettoes where they starved to death and began sending others to death camps where they were either murdered or forced into slave labor.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the killing continued. Nazi death squads murdered thousands of Jews in western Russia.

The indiscriminate murder of Jews became a burden for soldiers and Nazi sycophants. In an effort to streamline the killings, the Nazis convened a conference in the spring of 1942. The Wannsee Conference outside of Berlin came up with the "Final Solution," the systematic murder of all European Jews.

The Nazis created a series of concentration camps where Jews and other "undesirables" would be delivered by cattle cars to face extermination. Their bodies were incinerated in large ovens.

Throughout the remainder of the war, Jews in the countries occupied by Germany were deported by the thousands to the death camps. Places like Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz began to operate with ruthless Nazi efficiency.

The killing continued until the last months of WWII. The liberation of the camps, as the Nazis retreated, revealed the horrors that are still etched in the collective memory of the human race.

No, there are not "good people" on both sides of the growing neo-Nazi movement in the United States. When someone tells you over and over again that he intends to be a dictator on Day 1, you need to believe him. Germany slowly and silently slipped under the spell of a soulless and murderous authoritarian.

In a little more than two weeks, America has the power to chart a different course.

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