Remembering the Holocaust and That Evildoers' Looks Can Be Deceiving

SS personnel, including commandant Franz Reichleitner and deputy commandant
Johann Niemann, gather on a patio at Sobibor in 1943, drinking from glasses that
historians say could have been stolen from murdered Jews.

There is much media coverage of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp and other atrocities of the Holocaust.  The coverage is needed for multiple reasons, not the least of which are (i) far too many Americans know little about the Holocaust - an indictment of America's education system - (ii) hate is on the rise among right wing political and terrorist groups, and (ii) America is currently mistreating thousands of Central American refugees in conditions that are little better than concentrations camps even as the Trump/Pence regime (with the blessing of the right wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court) is reviving immigration restrictions like the ones used to bar European Jews from finding refuge from Nazi controlled Europe.  One of the things most disturbing about the Holocaust and those who murdered millions of other humans is that they looked so ordinary,  not like horrific monsters.  Indeed, they look no different than many in Trump's base who vary from indifferent to the suffering of others to those who are motivated by hate and racism.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at newly released photos of Nazi SS personnel and death camp commanders that urgently need to remind us that looks can be deceiving and that one's actions and/or willingness to be complicit in (or not actively oppose) evil are the true signs of moral bankruptcy.  Here are article highlights:

Historians in Germany have unearthed hundreds of photos of the notorious Sobibor death camp and other key sites in the Nazi extermination machine, stashed for decades in albums belonging to the camp's deputy commandant and in the attic and cupboards of the family home.

Previously, only two images of Sobibor existed in the archival record. The SS bulldozed the death camp — in a swampy, wooded area about 120 miles southeast of Warsaw — to hide evidence of mass murder.

The photos, made public in Berlin on Tuesday following the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, for the first time show SS leaders and their auxiliaries at Sobibor.

The images do not document the atrocities that went on there — how, in a period of 17 months, at least 167,000 Jews were killed in the gas chambers, their bodies later burned over an oven made of rail tracks.

Rather, historians in Germany and Washington describe the images as a devastating reminder of how life went on amid industrialized murder. The photos show smiling German officers posing with piglets and listening to an accordion player. Some sip from crystal glasses possibly stolen from their victims.

“It’s really disturbing,” said Andreas Kahrs, a historian with the Stanislaw Hantz Educational Center in Germany, which helped collect and analyze the photos. “You’d never guess that these SS officers drinking wine and beer are there at Sobibor. Then you realize the context. You know they are picnicking surrounded by the belongings of the Jews they murdered.”

One photo offers a glimpse of the roof of the gas chamber at Sobibor, along with a building where Jewish women were forced to shave their heads. Another shows the benign entrance of the death camp, where a fence stuffed with pine branches obscures what was happening inside. A third shows SS officers drinking and grinning on a patio of a mess hall known as the “Casino.”

The images belonged to Johann Niemann, one of the top SS officers at the death camp, who documented his rise through the ranks of the Third Reich in two photo albums: one bound in synthetic leather and embossed with the name of his previous SS unit, the other with an image of a sailing ship on the cover.

He died in October 1943, when the 600 remaining prisoners at Sobibor staged a revolt, killing more than a dozen German officers and auxiliary guards. Niemann, the acting commandant at the time, was lured to the tailor’s barracks with the promise of a leather jacket and killed by an ax to the head.

After a hero’s funeral, his belongings were sent to his wife.

The photos follow Niemann’s participation in Operation Reinhard, the secret SS plan to annihilate the Jews of occupied Poland. More than 1.7 million Jews were murdered between 1942 and 1943. Niemann’s photos of auxiliary guards from an SS training camp in the nearby Polish village of Trawniki were particularly intriguing to historians. Only a small number of German officers staffed the death camps. Instead, historians say, the SS relied on men from Trawniki to guard prisoners and operate the gas chambers. Historians in Germany said two photos of Trawniki guards may include accused Nazi collaborator John Demjanjuk, who was denaturalized in the United States and sent to Germany in 2009 to stand trial for his actions at Sobibor. Demjanjuk was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to prison for his role in the murder of more than 28,000 Jews at the death camp. He died a year later while the case was on appeal. Some of the photos recovered by historians show Niemann and Sobibor personnel on a field trip to Berlin. The group snapped photos on breaks by the side of the road, in beer gardens and at historical monuments. They are also pictured with high-ranking members of Hitler’s Chancellery. “They returned to the so-called normal world, the world of morals, of families, of more human ways of doing things, and then returned and continued doing this slaughter of human beings,” Friedberg said.

Frighteningly, we have would be Niemanns in our midst - Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a man condemned by his own relatives, immediately springs to mind.  

We must never forget and we can begin by voting out every politician who closes his or her eyes to evil being done by the current occupant of the White House and his sycophants and congressional enablers. . 

We Need to Recall America's Past Failings and Remember the Pittsburgh Dead

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Trump, Hitler, Their Supporters and Evil: The Absence of Empathy

While Der Trumpenführer has supposed taken action to halt future family separations, no plans exist to reunite children already torn from their parents.  The cruelty of the Trump regime policy shocked a majority modern day Americans, yet found support among at least 55% of Republicans according to one poll.  This leaves one grappling for an explanation for cruelty - evil is the correct word in my view - and how seemingly ordinary citizens can support such heinous policies.  The answer can be found in the aftermath of WWII when American psychologists working with top Nazi officials awaiting trial at Nuremberg.   One such American Army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trials was Captain G. M. Gilbert who made the following statement in his 1950 book Psychology of Dictatorship:

“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

Combined with this lack of empathy was a mindset enunciated by many Trump supporters that (i) the immigrants were "breaking the law" and/or (ii) those crudely separating families were merely "following orders" and, therefore, were devoid of blame.  A piece from five years ago in The Daily Beast tracks how these same excuses were used by Nazi supporters in Hitler's Germany.  Here are key excerpts:

Why do men commit evil? Were the kommandants who ran the Nazi death camps psychopaths? Did they have subnormal intelligence? Were they just ordinary men who made appalling decisions?  I have been thinking about these questions ever since I found out that my great-uncle, Hanns Alexander, a German Jew, was a Nazi Hunter. At the end of the Second World War he tracked down and caught one of the worst mass murderers of all time, Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz.

These were also the questions that a team of American psychologists and psychiatrists were directed to answer during the Nuremberg Trials that opened on November 20, 1945, six months after the war’s end. . . . With so many senior Nazis held in one place at the same time, the Americans instructed a panel of psychologists to conduct exten­sive interviews and tests with the defendants. Such horrific crimes were committed surely by damaged men, men different in some fundamental way from the rest of humanity.

Gilbert later wrote about his meeting with the Kommandant in his 1947 book Nuremberg Diary.  Gilbert asked for a brief career summary, and was surprised when Höss admitted in an unemotional tone that he had been responsible for the deaths of more than two and a half million Jews.

The American asked how it was possible to kill so many people. “Technically,” answered Höss, “that wasn’t so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.” Gilbert then pressed him for an emotional response, but Höss continued in a similar tone: “At the time there were no consequences to consider. It didn’t occur to me that I would be held responsible. You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible.” Gilbert started to ask, “But what about the human—” before Höss interrupted, “That just didn’t enter into it.”

Two days later, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, Major Leon Goldensohn, came to visit Rudolf Höss. . . . Goldensohn asked him how he felt mentally. Rudolf Höss replied: “I feel less nervous now than I did.” He was then asked if he felt upset over what he had done in Auschwitz. “I thought I was doing the right thing,” said Höss. “I was obeying orders, and now, of course, I see that it was unnecessary and wrong. But I don’t know what you mean by being upset about these things because I didn’t personally murder anybody. I was just the director of the extermination program at Auschwitz. It was Hitler who ordered it through Himmler and it was Eichmann who gave me the orders regarding transports.”

On 15 April 1946, Rudolf Höss provided his testimony at Nuremberg. In its candor and detail regarding the mechanics of the Final Solution it changed the course of the trial.  Rudolf Höss’ testimony was reported around the world. The New York Times described it as the “crushing climax to the case.” In Britain, The Times of London went further. They said of Höss’ signed testimony: “its dreadful implications must surpass any document ever penned.”

A few days later, Rudolf Höss was handed to the Polish authorities to face his own trial. In April 1947, the former kommandant was hung on the gallows next to the old crematorium in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The conclusion of the psychologists and psychiatrists at Nuremberg was clear: they both decided that though Rudolf Höss was intelligent, he was mentally ill: a psychopath, psychotic, amoral, lacking empathy.

An alternative theory of what underlies the character of the men and women who executed the Final Solution is put forward by Hannah Arendt. She argued that these men and women were typically not psychopaths or two-dimensional monsters. Rather they were ordinary men, who made a series of terrible decisions with horrific consequences.

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt—as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name—the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.

To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.

Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.

Remember that this piece just quoted was written five (5) years before today's Trump regime directed brutality towards undocumented immigrants and their families.  Other than the degree of the cruelty, is there really much difference between the staff at Auschwitz and ICE staff personnel implementing Trump's horrible policy?  As for the excuse raised by many Trump supporters/Republicans that the immigrant victims of Trump/Pence devised cruelty were "breaking the law," many 1930's Germans used the same excuse even as laws were being promulgated by the Nazis taking away the rights of Jews and others.  It seems that the admonition of the last paragraph quoted above has been forgotten, especially when it comes to not delegating one's thinking to others. 

I will admit that I am very sensitive to state directed discrimination and mistreatment of others simply because they are "different." I saw the drift toward cruelty and hatred in my waning days as a Republican as the Christofascists and evangelical Christians took over the GOP base.  These people are all about hatred of others and dehumanizing those toward whom they harbor animus.   I likewise experienced anti-gay bigotry when I was forced from a Virginia Beach based law firm for being gay.  From these experiences, I have some sense of what Gilbert was getting at.  When I was forced from my law firm so it could pander to "the sensibilities of conservative clients," no thought or concern was given to me or to my family, including my three young children.  Such was the lack of empathy/morality of self-styled prominent members of the local legal community. 

America is at a turning point.  Either the decent and moral majority mobilizes and defeats the forces of evil embodied in the Trump/Pence regime and its GOP enablers - voting them out of office is easily feasible come November - or America is accelerating down the road towards fascism and a repeat of its most ugly history.

In Face of Evil, Don't be Silent

No doubt some Facebook "friends" and other social circle "friends" - specifically, those who voted for Donald Trump - likely wish I'd be quite and stop making my dismay evident over the election of Donald Trump, a/k/a, Der Fuhrer, and such "friends'" complicity in the undermining of America's constitutional order.  Such wishes will not be granted.  There is too much at stake and I refuse to "get over it" as these individuals tell me to do and I refuse to be quiet. The reality is that bad things happen when good people do nothing.   Stated another way, as set out below, “evil does not need your help; just your indifference.”  At this moment in time, far too many Americans are indifferent to the rising tide of racism and bigotry directed at ethnic and religious minorities, LGBT Americans, in some cases, women, and anyone who isn't a white right wing Christian. Elena Barr Baum, the director of the Holocaust Commission of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, has a guest editorial in the Virginian Pilot (prompted by growing white supremacist and anti-Semitic activities) that reminds why we cannot be silent in the face of evil.  Here are highlights:

When someone compares his movement to Nazism, quoting “the original German,” is it newsworthy? When someone calls for a “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” and leads his followers, gathered in the Ronald Reagan office building in Washington, D.C., in a raised-hand salute exclaiming “Hail, Trump,” should the media report this?

The alt-right media celebrated it. Where was the mainstream media, on Nov. 19 when Richard Spencer, the leader of the National Policy Institute – a white nationalist think tank – addressed his faithful this way, just blocks from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Spencer announced matter-of-factly that, “America was until this past generation a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity.” He added, “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

Spencer’s statement goes against the very fabric of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

While we are still getting over our history of enslaving other human beings, we are and were intended to be citizens of a land that believes all people are created equal. After much struggle, we have finally begun to make progress toward the civil rights and equality for all that our founding fathers spoke about so eloquently. People of all races, religions, genders and sexual orientations deserve the respect and the rights that America promises.

Why does Spencer’s hate speech, egged on by Nazi-saluting followers, not raise the warning flag to the majority of Americans?

While the mainstream media did not pay much attention to Spencer’s comments, Holocaust scholars and educators did. The Association of Holocaust Organizations, of which the Holocaust Commission of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater is a member, issued a statement last week about the rise of such speech, signed by over 90 Holocaust institutions and over 70 scholars.

“We denounce racism and the politics of fear that fuels it. … We stand in solidarity with all vulnerable groups. We take Elie Wiesel’s words to heart: ‘I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.’ ”

The organization’s statement is a clarion: “We call upon all elected officials as well as all civic and religious leaders to forcefully and explicitly condemn the rise in hate speech and any attacks on our democratic principles. We call upon all media and social media platforms to refuse to provide a stage for hate groups and thus normalize their agenda. And we call upon all people of good conscience to be vigilant, to not be afraid, and to speak out.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit watchdog for hate groups, reported that 867 hate incidents occurred in the 10 days following the November election. The trend has not subsided much.

Just last week, the white supremacist website the Daily Stormer (sound like “Der Sturmer,” the infamous Nazi-sympathizing newspaper in the 1930s?) called for “an old fashioned troll storm” on Jews and other minorities in Whitefish, Mont. Why? Because the mother of Richard Spencer lives there, and her business has shrunk with the increased media exposure of her son’s rancid ideology.

When the people of Whitefish, in a statement by their mayor, came out against Spencer’s brand of white supremacy earlier this month, the Daily Stormer in retaliation posted names and contact information of their targets, including a child, superimposing yellow stars of David on photos of them, and asked its readers to “take action.”

The Holocaust did not begin with killing. It began with words. It is time for good people to stand up.

The Holocaust Commission calls on the Hampton Roads community to heed the words of the late survivor Hanns Loewenbach, who ended every talk he gave to literally tens of thousands of people in schools, churches and military audiences with these words: “Evil does not need your help; just your indifference.”

Don't Tell People Not to Be Alarmed by Trump/Pence

As noted in the prior post, the weekend has been difficult as the husband and I try to continue relationships with "friends" who voted for Donald Trump.  Among the things we have been told is that none of the things Trump pledge to do to win the Christofascist vote will happen.  We have also been told by individuals that "they've got our back."  Of course, all of those making such statements are white, heterosexual Christians who have no clue as to what it is like to be gay and to know what it is like to face open animus.  I take no comfort in any of these platitudes and attempts to assuage the speakers' own uneasiness that just maybe they should have done their homework and that perhaps they may have made a horrific mistake.  A piece the Times of Israel makes the case that I and others may not be over reacting or being melodramatic.  And even if we are, no one should be telling us to "get over it" and "move on."  Better to prepare for the worse and hope for the best than to stick one's head in the sand.  Here are article excerpts:

Georg [my grandfather] was Jewish. Elsa [my grandmother] was half-Jewish. The family was not religious in the slightest; they were fully assimilated to the cultural life of the glittering Austrian capital.

When Hitler came in, my grandfather shook his head. “There have always been anti-Semites,” he said. “We’ll stay quiet, and things will get better.”

Georg was an optimist. Hitler was just another colorful rabble-rousing politician. Things would settle down.

Elsa knew better. She knew what was coming, even if she couldn’t fully name it. Within a few weeks of Hitler’s takeover she was working to get the family out of the country. She tried contacts in the US, New Zealand, France, and even India. They all came to naught — until she learned of a special program in the UK that would allow Jewish doctors and engineers to emigrate with their families.

Georg didn’t want to go. Elsa told him she was taking my father (then 3) and my aunt (then 6) and going, and he could stay behind and look for another wife if he liked. My grandfather, protesting all the way that my grandmother was overreacting and having delusions, reluctantly sold his [medical] practice.

My family settled in England, first near Manchester and later in rural Oxfordshire. As you might guess, nearly all the rest of my father’s extended family perished in the Holocaust.

My grandmother’s fear saved the family. My grandfather’s sweet confidence and optimism would have killed them.

So when you tell me, a noted soother and calmer of others, that I should tell Muslims and women and people of color that they have nothing to fear from Trump, I think that perhaps you want me to be like my grandfather.

People are scared. They have every right to be. Trump’s words speak of an intent to violate fundamental liberties; Trump’s words inveigle violence; Trump’s words abrogate a social contract that says that we should quietly respect election results.

Perhaps Trump will be a better leader than we thought. The burden is entirely on him to prove that his campaign was an act, and that he and his followers pose no threat to women and minorities. Until then, suspicion. Until then, fear. Until then, anger.  Until then, I’m thinking like Elsa, not Georg.

The Dangers of America's Refusal to Admit Its Past

A piece in Salon looks at an issue that I believe is far more important than many want to concede: America's refusal to honestly look at and admit the ugly elements of its past, a past that includes slavery, Jim Crow, the mass extermination of Native Americans, the stealing of Hawaii, brutal child labor.  The list goes on and on.  Yet many, especially those on the far right, want to remember nothing of the ugly past and instead celebrate the myth of American exceptionalism.  Refusing to face and admit the failures and horrors of the past set the stage for the same horrors to be repeated in one form or another.  Look no farther than the anti-transgender campaign in Houston and its echo's of Nazi propaganda to see how the past continues to haunt us.  What I see as the most frightening is the right's effort to rewrite and sanitize America's ugly past.   Here are some excerpts from the column:

Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House one spring day in 1865, bringing an end to the noble Southern cause that his great adversary, Ulysses S. Grant, described as “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” But despite appearances the Confederacy had not been defeated, and today’s Republican Party represents its values almost perfectly. For reasons that are both obvious and deeply perverse, people in small Northeastern towns celebrate the Rebel flag their own ancestors shed blood to defeat. Eight hundred thousand died in that war and slavery came to an end, at least as a legal institution under that name. But with the defeat of Reconstruction it was transformed into a long-term system of white supremacy whose persistent effects, and whose very existence, must be repeatedly denied or minimized or greeted with a puzzled shrug. 

Why are black people still overwhelmingly poor and poorly educated? Why are they far more likely to live in substandard housing in poorly served neighborhoods, far more likely to be victims of crime and to be shot by police? One of our two political parties, the one that has been increasingly dominated over the last three decades by the great-great-grandchildren of the Confederacy, is pretty much built on the premise that those problems can only be black people’s fault — or, in the more beneficent view, can be blamed on diabolical white liberals who led the innocent black folk astray with “free stuff.” They certainly can’t have anything to do with the fact that African-Americans were enslaved until 150 years ago, had few or no political rights until 50 years ago, and throughout their history on this continent have been redlined and ghettoized and marginalized and covenant-excluded and financially exploited by an endless array of swindlers and usurers and predatory lenders.

Those things, we are constantly and nervously assured by red-faced men on television as they project their own fears and anxieties onto Black Lives Matter protesters or Quentin Tarantino or whomever else, are in the past. In the discourse of the American right, the past can only be one of two things: A) a story of glorious patriotism and heroism, or B) something that did not happen or does not matter. We don’t need to summon Faulkner in order to observe that police brutality and the shootings of unarmed black men are not in the past, and neither is our society’s worsening economic inequality, which includes a shocking racial disparity. According to a U.S. Census Bureau survey, the median white household in 2011 held just over $111,000 in total wealth. For the median black household, that number was barely $7,000 – 16 times less, or 8 cents in black wealth for every white dollar.

What I was looking for was an acknowledgment of the facts. And I think the reason that I was looking for an acknowledgment of the facts is that I understand the failure to acknowledge the facts as, in some way, an apology for what happened. And from there it’s a thin line between apology and acceptance, between acceptance and complicity, between complicity and active engagement. I suppose it’s that sense that if we don’t recognize the facts for what they are, we make it possible, or more likely, that those kinds of facts may repeat themselves.  

[W]hat the difference is, in general terms, between that and what we see in the Ukraine [in the film] with a group of characters gathering, you know, in Nazi uniforms for a re-enactment, or a burial of Ukrainian and German war heroes? What is the difference between that and a re-enactment of the Civil War? It’s a desire for a particular community to find connection and legitimacy with the past. And in finding connection and legitimacy, the danger is that you reinforce the conditions that continue to work their unhappy consequences.

“And we have to understand, equally, that this is not just historical material. I’ve been very involved in the last years on the issue of torture, for example. And I think that the amnesia in the United States about engaging with the fact that the country turned to torture once again after September the 11th — I think it’s going to have enormous consequences going forward. Even though it may not be perceived as having consequences within the United States, outside of the United States it was a huge moment for those who hold the United States to a higher standard because it is the world leader on human rights. It becomes too bloody easy to wheel it out and say, ‘Look, if they can do torture, then I can do torture.’”

If the past is not really past – the past of “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation,” the past of Auschwitz and the Krakow ghetto, the past of American slavery and its endless repercussions – then it is still with us, and still shaping our behavior. As Sands makes clear, willful historical amnesia can be found in all parts of the world, but America has developed it into a poisonous and intoxicating high art. Our powerful national identity is rooted in the mythological notion that we are different and exceptional, free of the depressing chains of the past that hold other nations back from greatness. At this point in our history that belief is literally driving us insane.

Sands talks sadly about his friend Horst, the child of Nazis who does not want to know what really happened, and who drifts ever closer to denying that it happened at all. “Things unsaid have long-term consequences,” says Sands. “You think by pushing things under the carpet that you sort them out and they go away. But you’re doing the opposite, and they only get worse.”

Huckabee’s "Oven" Attack On Obama Masks His Own Anti-Semitism

So far I have held back on commenting on Mike Huckabee's horrific claim the Barack Obama's Iran nuclear agreement "will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven."   But, given his refusal to apologize and walk back the statement - which seems aimed at cynically whipping up the Christofascist voters in the GOP base - a comment and condemnation seem in order.  As regular readers know, I believe that Huckabee is a despicable individual.  Hypocrite also needs to be added as a descriptive term of the man.  Like most of the far right Christofascists, when push comes to shove, Huckabee cares about Israel for one reason and one reason only: Israel is key in setting the stage for Armageddon and the supposed return of Christ.  

Of course, when Armageddon comes, most Jews will perish if one believes the allegedly inerrant Bible.   Thus, Huckabee actually doesn't care about the Israeli people.  He merely sees them as a means to bring about Armageddon.  With "friends" like Huckabee, Israel truly needs no enemies.   And as blogger friend Karen Ocamb points out, Huckabee supports a form of far right Christians who continue to support a view of Jews as "Christ-killers."  Here are excerpts from Karen's post on the issue:

While many are engaged in a reasoned debate over the deal, others are using it as an excuse for political grandstanding. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, for instance, seems to have torn a page from publicity hound Donald Trump’s poll-spiking, over-the-top playbook and commented on the deal—to almost universal condemnation.

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history,” Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Fox News contributor, told Breitbart on Saturday. “It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

Fred Karger, the openly gay, Jewish, former 2012 Republican presidential candidate, also reacted strongly.  “No matter what you think of the nuclear deal with Iran, Mike Huckabee crossed the line by comparing it to the Holocaust. Huckabee will say anything to try and stay relevant while he also tries to divert attention away from the host of problems he faces in his campaign for president,” Karger said in an email. Karger has created a SuperPAC to look into Huckabee’s campaign and character.

Huckabee [self-appointed] entitlement to co-opt the Holocaust comes from his many years as a tour guide to Israel with the “Israel Experience With Mike Huckabee”—a favorite with evangelical Christians awaiting Armageddon.

Baptist minister Mike Huckabee is pledging to listen to God and not the “false prophets” if he is elected president—which begs the question of what he might do militarily to hasten Armageddon. But Huckabee’s Christian warrior message can be confusing. 

But in light of his comments about having been to Auschwitz as a tourist—I have stood at that oven door. I know exactly what it looks like.”—it is perhaps useful to consider Huckabee’s support for Mel Gibson, whom Huckabee thinks should be forgiven for what many perceived as anti-Semitic comments and attitudes, which Gibson may have inherited from his father, a religious zealot who said the Holocaust never happened.

[I]t is Huckabee—the presidential candidate who has seen “the door of the oven”—who fails to understand that Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is controversial precisely for its dangerous depiction of Jews. Here’s an excerpt from one Jewish review:

“For Jews who have used this movie to confirm their conviction that Christians will always hate Jews, Gibson has perpetrated an unforgivable crime that negates one of the most remarkable acts of communal religious repentance in history. The Second Vatican Council acknowledged the sin of the Church for almost 2000 years in blaming the Jews for the death of Jesus. Neither the Jews of that generation or of those to come, they decreed, bear any guilt for deicide. In 1988, the Vatican published Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion, with a list of nine points that any future depictions of Passion Plays are to use as guides. Gibson’s movie ignores every one of them.

This is the true offense about the “door of the oven” comment: Christian extremist Mike Huckabee believes he has the right to talk about the Holocaust while passionately loving a film that portrayed Jews as Hitler and his Nazi Party saw them. 

Holocaust Historian Debunks Christofascist Gays Are Nazi Lies

If one compares the propaganda the Nazi regime against Jews and the anti-gay propaganda of the Christofascists one thing becomes striking: the Christofascist campaign against gays utilizes the template perfected by the Nazi regime in the 1930's against European Jews.   E.g., gays/Jews are diseased, gays/Jews are out to prey on children, gays/Jews are a small rich minority harming Christians, etc., etc.  Yet despite this fact, leading mouth pieces for the "godly folks" continue to claim that gays were behind the Nazi regime.   Like everything that comes out of the mouths of these people, it is all a lie.  As Queerty reports, a Holocaust historian has again debunked this vicious lie.  Here are higlights:

Bryan Fischer boasts a huge radio audience, religious right fan base, and a dangerous obsession with homosexuality. Even when his propaganda is disproven by facts, he keeps right on repeating it, ad nauseam. There’s his constant conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia.

One particularly ugly canard, drawn from Scott Lively‘s discredited 1998 book The Pink Swastika, claims that gay men dominated the Nazi Party ranks and instituted many of the horrors of the Third Reich. The notion is so absurd even Lively’s absurd employer, the far-right American Family Association, distanced itself from the claim.

The demonstrably false claim serves several purposes for antigay activists like Fischer. For one, it turns gay men into jackbooted thugs rather than victims of the antigay right that they are today, not to mention in Nazi Germany, where tens of thousands were murdered or perished at concentration camps. It also justifies extreme antigay measures because we are defined as the moral descendants of the worst villains in history. Fischer and his far-right ilk view themselves as under siege, like Jews in Nazi Germany, but they also fancy themselves the conquering Army, led by General God.

[H]e received an email from historian Peter Black with a detailed destruction of the Fischer-Lively claims.

The response from the Holocaust historian, in full:

The Nazis shared the belief with many in the German population that same gender sexual relations were 1) unnatural and immoral; 2) undermined the cohesiveness of the family; 3) increased the habit and temptation to engage in other criminal behavior; 3) encouraged the seduction and corruption of minors; 4) and rendered public sector officials vulnerable to blackmail by foreign intelligence agents and (5) both public and private sector employees susceptible to using or demanding sexual favors in the workplace to obtain or grant discriminatory treatment in hiring, promoting, receiving assignments, rewarding and disciplining employees.

On a broader level, the Nazis also shared with many others among all classes of German society a notion that homosexuality undermined the vitality of the German male, and the capacity of Germans to stand up for themselves diplomatically or in war. Beyond this, the Nazis believed that homosexuals undermined the future of the German race by not devoting their sexual energy to reproduction. Even here, the Nazis had no exclusive ownership of this belief on this belief.

Hence when the Nazis came to power, over the first three years of Nazi rule, they 1) broadened the applicability of the law to criminalize even gestures without touching that might suggest a homosexual relationship or intent to engage in same-gender sex; 2) decreed stiffer penalties for persons convicted under the broader law; and 3) ordered more focused and consistent police enforcement of the law. Under Nazi rule, some 100,000 persons were arrested under the law; approximately 63,000 were convicted. . . . were sent to concentration camps, where hundreds, possibly thousands died under Nazi rule.

There are no records of 40,000 “confessions of Nazi Party members to having engaged in same-gender sex.  There is no record to confirm that the Nazi Party was founded in a so-called gay bar.

While SA Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm did place on his staff individuals who were homosexuals — primarily because he had known them for years and could count on their personal loyalty to him — neither he nor the SA commanders ever recruited on this basis.
There is no documentation that would confirm that the killers on June 30 1934 of Röhm and the other victims, were, as a group, homosexuals, either openly or “in the closet.”  The three main conspirators — Himmler, Heydrich, and Goring — were not homosexuals, nor were the best known of the executioners, Josef Sepp Dietrich and Theodor Eicke.

There is no reliable documentation that would confirm that Baldur von Schirach (Hitler Youth Leader), Franz Gürtner (Minister of Justice to 1941), Otto von Thierack (Minister of Justice (1942-1945) Hjalmar Schacht (Minister of Economics to 1938), Walter Funk (Minister of Economics,. 1938-1945), Hermann Göring, Hans Frank (Hitler’s personal lawyer up to 1939, or any of his personal bodyguards were gay.

There is no reliable documentation to confirm that Hitler worked as a male prostitute in Vienna.

While there is plenty of evidence that both Himmler and Hitler were implacably hostile to the Christian Churches and denominations, in particular the Catholic Church, there is no documentation that provides confirmation that either was, as the article says, “a closet homosexual”.

[T]he existing documentary evidence does not confirm that “many of the guards and administrators responsible for the concentration camp horrors were themselves homosexuals.” After 1941, conviction under paragraph 175 (sexual deviation) for an SS man meant at a minimum expulsion from the SS and could carry a death sentence.  

The Woman in Gold: Reflections

Adele Boch-Bauer - the woman in gold

This evening after going to the family visitation for the deceased partner of a friend, the husband and I went to see "The Woman in Gold" which recounts the story of Maria Altmann, a Vienna born elderly Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who successfully sued the Austrian government to win the return of artwork stolen by the Nazis regime in the wake of the Anschluss when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany.  Besides the compelling personal story of what happened to Altmann's family and Austria's refusal to admit the illegal manner in which the artwork came to be in the Austrian State Gallery - the case went to the U. S. Supreme Court in Republic of Austria v. Altmann (2004) - the movie contains a needed retelling of what was done during the Holocaust under the Nazis.   But the movie, in my view has an even wider message: the dangers of what can happen when ideology, religious belief and/or the desire to target classes of people for political gain combine.  

Some will say - as does one character in the movie  - that the past needs to be forgotten.  I believe that the exact opposite is the case.  If we do not know and remember the ugliness of the past we are likely doomed to repeat it in some form or another.   Likewise, we cannot allow individuals or institutions that have committed horrible deeds in the past to try to cloak themselves in respectability and in some case demand deference.  Hitler may have been a madman as some like to argue, but his techniques are still being used today, most often in this country by conservative Christians and politicians eager to win the votes of bigots and racists (as noted in other posts, Vladimir Putin is using Hitler's techniques in Russia).

For political purposes, Hitler needed to blame someone for Germany's defeat in World War I. The Jews became the scapegoats for Germany’s economic catastrophe following the war.   Hitler had good religious backing for his antisemitism: Martin Luther founder of the Lutheran Church, was a raging anti-Semite.  The Roman Catholic Church too for centuries had call Jews "Christ killers."  In short, Hitler had a ready made template from which to launch his mistreatment of Jews and ultimately their murder in the "Final Solution." Yes, some religious leaders in Germany and Austria opposed Hitler and his policies, by far more went willingly along with the program.  Political expediency combined with a religious based bigotry lead to horrors and millions and millions of lost lives.

One would think that the world would have learned from the Holocaust and World War II.  But, too often seemingly not.  Here in America we have the Bible used to justify everything from unequal treatment of blacks and gays - downright discrimination and persecution at times and in some locales - to savaging the social safety net.  Likewise, we have "family values" organizations spewing hate and lies about gays which, if one changes the word "gay" or "homosexual" to "Jew," the statements are near carbon copies of anti-Jewish propaganda used by the Nazis.  And lest we forget, these very same people who are doing the victimizing claim that it is they, not their victims who are being persecuted - just as Hitler claimed the Jews were harming good Germans.  Worse yet, we have politicians only too happy to play upon the hate and bigotry and effort to dehumanize others in order to court the votes of bigots, racists and the ignorant. 

If you haven't seen the movie, go see it.  And after you see it, look around you in today's political and fundamentalist religious circles and reflect on it and think of the wider application of what you witness being done to Vienna's Jews in the movie.   Hate, division, and the dehumanization of others is alive and well in our midst. 

P.S. I was perhaps especially moved by the movie because my paternal grandparents were from Austria - they left just before World War I.

Remembering Kristallnacht and Remembering the Fruits of Religious Bigotry

Today is the 76th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night that in Nazi Germany 1000 synagogues were burned; 7000 Jewish were businesses were destroyed; some 30,000 Jews were arrested and 91 Jews were murdered.  At the time, little did people know that the horrors of that night would pale compared to what was coming under the name the Final Solution.  Many decent people say, "that can never happen again."    Yet the mindset that was behind Kristallnacht is alive and well.  Here in America, much of the Christian Right's foulest propaganda against gays comes directly out of the Nazi play book.  Exchange gay for Jew and some of the claims are near identical: that we are diseased, that we threaten Christina civilization, that we prey on children.  The list goes on and on.  Then in Russia, we see Vladimir Putin's disgusting regime passing anti-gay laws that are reminiscent of Nazi laws against the Jews. Farther afield, we see ISIS murdering men, women and children who do not subscribe to ISIS's toxic form of Islam.  It is happening again and far too many once again are doing nothing to stop it.  A friend posted a link on Facebook to a blog post by a friend that remembers the horrors of November 9, 1938, and the fact that the ghastly mindset is still alive and well and that all too often, at least in America, backed by those who claim to be "godly Christians."  Here are some excepts (images included):

In a Weekend Edition Saturday piece [November 9, 2013] commemorating the 75th anniversary ofKristallnacht, the Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlander notes of what translates to The Night of the Broken Glass, “I did not hear fire engines and we understood then that they didn’t come because they wanted the synagogues to burn. We never thought that Germans would stand by, and not do something about it.”

Kristallnacht more properly translates, colloquially, as “The Night of the Broken Crystal.” The symbolism was plain: Jews enjoy their ill-gotten luxury while “real” Germans starve; let us smash their riches, and their owners. The anti-Semitism had been building, of course, but with the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst von Rath by the Polish-Jewish Herschel Grynszpan, the Nazis (via the S.A.) finally had their excuse for widespread, and rampant, terrorism against the Jews of Germany and Austria.

Between 9 and 10 November 1938, 1000 synagogues burned; 7000 Jewish businesses were destroyed; 30000 Jews were arrested and 91 murdered—a tiny foretaste of the genocidal horror to come.

“Never again?” Hardly. The world has “stood by and done nothing” countless times since 1938, and will doubtless do so again.

In the Weekend Edition piece cited above, Stefan Redlich, spokesman for the Berlin police is quoted as saying, “The Berlin police protects all Jewish schools, all hospitals, all kindergartens and all synagogues in the city” [while] “noting that 250 policemen stand guard in front of Jewish properties throughout the city.

“But German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently said she is not proud of this fact: ‘I feel deep shame that there is not a single Jewish building in Germany without police protection because we still have to worry about anti-Semitic attacks.’

Meanwhile, in the former Soviet Union, where the population eagerly acts on Putin’s pogroms against gay Russians with salivating bloodlust, preparations are under way for the Winter Olympics. A good time, perhaps, to invoke this Jewish Chronicle cartoon, published as Herr Hitler and his minions played host to the 1936 Olympiad.

Never forget? Never again?  Don’t make me laugh.

Russian police with LGBT's

The Christian Roots of the Holocaust

Today's Christofascists are know best for who they hate and their contempt for others who do not subscribe to their toxic religious beliefs.  Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon among the "godly folk" and too many Christian denominations ignore the evils that they have perpetrated over time and perhaps deliberately ignore the misdeeds of their early leaders.  As Bob Felton notes at Civil Commotion, soon Hitler's Mein Kampf will again be available in bookstores.  Some ponder way the views of a man synonymous with evil should be publicly available.  In part I share that view.  On the other hand, if we are going to censor the publication of Hitler's anti-Semitic views, then there should be consistency in that policy.  Felton rightly points out that much of Hitlers views on the Jews traces directly back to what was long Christian policy: contempt for and mistreatment of Jews.   Don't believe this?  Felton offers some examples of the foul anti-Semitics views of Martin Luther.  Here are some highlights:

Hitler remains a sort of perverse ‘gold standard’ for evil. The sort of people who find reason in that sort of thing, who find an explanation for their unhappy, resentment-filled lives, will find a way to read it. Suppressing it will accomplish nothing but stimulating interest in it; better to drag it out to the light of day, where it can be laughed at.

Here is what I have always found interesting about the suppression of Nazism-related ideas: Martin Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies uses anti-semitic language that is vastly more brutal than Hitler’s language in Main Kampf, and it is never mentioned in connection with Germany’s anti-semitism.

What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming. If we do, we become sharers in their lies, cursing and blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak, nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether we might save at least a few from the glowing flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a thousand times worse than we could wish them already has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere advice:

First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly ­ and I myself was unaware of it ­ will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.

Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For they pursue in them the same aims as in their synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof or in a barn, like the gypsies. This will bring home to them that they are not masters in our country, as they boast, but that they are living in exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and lament about us before God.

Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. (remainder omitted)

Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. For they have justly forfeited the right to such an office by holding the poor Jews captive with the saying of Moses (Deuteronomy 17 [:10 ff.]) in which he commands them to obey their teachers on penalty of death, although Moses clearly adds: “what they teach you in accord with the law of the Lord.” Those villains ignore that. They wantonly employ the poor people’s obedience contrary to the law of the Lord and infuse them with this poison, cursing, and blasphemy. In the same way the pope also held us captive with the declaration in Matthew 16 {:18], “You are Peter,” etc, inducing us to believe all the lies and deceptions that issued from his devilish mind. He did not teach in accord with the word of God, and therefore he forfeited the right to teach.

Fifth, I advise that safe­conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen, or the like. Let they stay at home. (…remainder omitted).

Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and put aside for safekeeping. The reason for such a measure is that, as said above, they have no other means of earning a livelihood than usury, and by it they have stolen and robbed from us all they possess. Such money should now be used in no other way than the following: Whenever a Jew is sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred, two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal circumstances may suggest. With this he could set himself up in some occupation for the support of his poor wife and children, and the maintenance of the old or feeble. For such evil gains are cursed if they are not put to use with God’s blessing in a good and worthy cause.

Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children of Adam (Gen 3[:19]}. For it is not fitting that they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat of our faces while they, the holy people, idle away their time behind the stove, feasting and farting, and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat. No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat of their pants.

Hitler merely plowed ground prepared by Martin Luther, so why is Luther so little discussed and so readily available?

Bob is all too right.  And the Catholic Church was no better than Luther.  Yet we continue to see special deference given to conservative Christians in America and elsewhere in the world despite the evils that their world view has caused.  Reading the quoted passages above, one could argue that all Hitler did was implement Luther's recommendations.  Religion continues to be one of the great evils in the world today - just as it has been throughout history.

Refusing Sanctuary to Children in Need

Throughout its history, America has done some very horrific things ranging from what equates to the genocide of Native Americans, stealing Hawaii by overthrowing the Hawaiian monarchy, retaining slavery decades after many European nations banned it, to mistreatment of the unfortunate.  Today, we are seeing the ugliest aspects of America along our southern boarders where "real Americans" - many who hypocritically claim to be Christians - are demonstrating and engaging in hateful behavior rather than allow children from Central America into this country.   If you want to know why I hold conservative Christians/Tea Party folks in such open contempt, just watch their behavior in parts of California, Texas and Arizona.  It is particularly telling that it is us agnostics, atheist and deists - liberals if you will who are upset by the horrible behavior of our fellow Americans.  A piece in the Dallas Morning News looks at the disgraceful behavior of these foul individuals.  Here are highlights:

Exactly 75 years and one month ago the St. Louis, a German trans-Atlantic liner carrying 938 Jewish refugees, was turned away from the United States, forced to return to Europe. U.S. law didn’t allow them sanctuary.

Today we are preparing to send 45,000 children back to Central American countries controlled by drug cartels that routinely torture, rape and kill children who refuse to work for them. So routinely, so often are children menaced that their families sent them away, alone, across thousands of miles on just the slimmest of hopes that they might be safe.

U.S. law doesn’t allow them sanctuary.

The St. Louis is famous now as a failure of compassion that haunts American history. It is so easy to imagine the despair of those passengers, forced to return to countries that would soon be overrun by the Nazis. It is difficult to imagine an America that would be so cruel and insensible to the terror of others. President Franklin Roosevelt is still held accountable for his failure to respond.

And now we have President Barack Obama promising to send the children back. We have an America demanding that he do so, and in fact, blaming his administration for not securing the borders more tightly so that those desperate Central American families would have had no hope at all that their children might find sanctuary.

There are differences, of course, between these children and Jews on the St. Louis.

These children didn’t arrive on an ocean liner. They walked through some of the most hostile, hot, barren, dangerous country in the world. No one knows how many died. Their parents weren’t with them. They were sent by poor families so terrified for their safety that they paid many thousands of dollars and entrusted their children to criminals hoping they might arrive in America and be safe.

We have heard their stories now. Stories of children who are publicly stripped naked and gang raped by drug syndicates. Stories of children maimed. Stories of children murdered.

Hearing how callous the world was to the suffering of Europe’s Jews, we are baffled. We wonder how that slaughter could have been allowed to happen. We wonder why countries closed their borders.

I don’t wonder anymore. I’ve listened to the politicians, read the editorials and heard the voices of American citizens demanding that terrified children be sent back into harm’s way.

Our hearts are not touched by these children. We want the law enforced. This is our country. Ours. And we don’t have to share it. Not now. Not 75 years ago.

We haven’t changed at all.

Why? It’s simple, really. A matter of us and them. Yes, these are children whom we’ll send back to be raped, maimed and killed. But they aren’t our children. Our children are precious.

If there is a Hell, I suspect that the largest numbers of those there will be the falsely pious "godly folk," the fundamentalist preachers, the bitter Catholic clergy and, of course, countless members of the Tea Party and members of falsely named "family values" organizations that market hate and bigotry against others.