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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