Could We? Would We?

 

Could We? Would We?

In his book In the Garden of Beasts,[1] Erik Larson tells a horrific story, one of many such horrific stories one could tell from Germany in 1933, the time when this story took place.In this story, which Larson presents as historically accurate, three young Americans have traveled from Berlin to Nuremberg. As they check into their hotel, they notice something going on out in the street. As they watch, a band of Sturmabteilung thugs comes marching up the street. They are half supporting, half dragging what appears to be a person with them. The person turns out to be a young German woman named Anna Rath. She is not a Jew. The Americans learn that the SA mob is tormenting and torturing her because she had planned to marry her boyfriend, who was a Jew. The SA goons have hung a sign around her neck that read, “I offered myself to a Jew.” A large crowd of the ordinary people of Nuremberg get excited. They cheer on the SA brutes as they continue to drag her along the street. They sing the Horst Wessel Lied, the anthem of the Nazi party. Larson doesn’t say what became of Frӓulein Rath.

This story is horrific in two different ways. First, the Sturmabteilung was the Nazi party’s paramilitary force that was, in 1933, Hitler’s main instrument for tormenting and damaging Germany’s Jewish people. It was far bigger than the regular German military. It’s members truly were brutes, violent thugs who delighted in attacking innocent people. A political party had come to power in Germany that not only had such an enormous instrument of torment and torture, it had let that instrument loose on the German population. Anyone who wasn’t sufficiently Nazi was a target of its violence. At least some of the Americans in Larson’s book evaluated the Nazis too favorably, but we must remember that they did not know what we know about the Nazis because most of the horror they produced hadn’t happened yet. Some Americans and other foreigners in Berlin were starting to tumble to just how horrible the Hitler regime was going to be, especially for Jews, but not all of them did.

The second way in which this story is horrific is the way the crowd of ordinary Germans reacted to the display of hatred and cruelty that was taking place before them. The crowd watching the demonic parade of the SA loved what they saw. They cheered the SA men on as they tortured a helpless young woman. Two of the young Americans who saw what happened were repelled by it. One of them made excuses for it. She said things like this was just an isolated incident, and we shouldn’t judge before we know the whole story. We know that that young American was naïve at best and was failing to see the diabolical nature of what was starting to happen in Germany.

A much more important issue is how ordinary German people could so enthusiastically accept Hitler and the Nazis when Hitler and the Nazis made no bones about the fact that they hated Jews and were hellbent on harming them in every way they could. I have a personal story that may shed some light on that issue. My family and I lived in Berlin for the 1957-58 academic year while my father did historical research. I was eleven years old. 1957 was only twelve years after the end of World War II and only twenty-four years after 1933, when Larson’s book begins. We lived with a woman named Annamarie von Goedel. She was a widow, but her late husband had been a member of the Nazi party. She still had his Nazi party uniform hanging in her closet. She had no real understanding of just how horrific the Nazi regime had been. One day she said to us, “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but then something did have to be done.” That stunningly insensitive statement of hers reveals two things about the success of Nazi totalitarianism.

First, it reveals how ordinary German people had bought the Nazi lie that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I and all of the myriad troubles that followed that defeat. There weren’t all that many Jews in Germany at the time. Larson puts the number at significantly less than 200,000. They were a tiny percentage of the German population. Some of them had been very successful in business, the professions, and academics, especially in the scientific disciplines; but there was no way they were responsible for Germany’s troubles. Hitler told people that they were, and most Germans bought that lie.

Second, Annamarie’s “something had to be done” shows us that ordinary Germans were perfectly happy to let someone else solve “the Jewish question” by whatever means that someone else chose. Annamarie really did put her statement in the passive. It wasn’t that the Germans did anything to the Jews, something just happened to the Jews. The Nazis were, of course, anything but passive in their treatment of Europe’s Jews. But Annamarie apparently thought that she and all other ordinary Germans had been passive in it. She said, in effect, we didn’t do it, it was just done.

That is how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes come to power, maintain their hold on power, and do horrific things with their power. First they create “the Big Lie.” It can be a big lie about what’s really happening in their country. It can be a big lie about who is responsible for the bad things, real or imagined, that are going on their country. The bigger the better. The more often those seeking absolute power tell the lie the better. The big lie always includes the claim that only those telling the big lie are capable of solving their country’s problems. That’s what Hitler and the Nazis did in Germany. It’s what Lenin, Stalin, and the Communists did in Russia. It is what totalitarians have done the world over, and it has worked for them in an appalling number of places.

Today the fabric of my country is being torn apart by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.[2] MAGA isn’t a political party, but the people of that movement have taken complete control of the Republican Party, long one of America’s two major political parties. Donald Trump tells more lies than anyone can really keep track of, but he tells some big lies in particular. He says that the United States is experiencing a horrific crisis. He says our cities are crime-ridden. He says the economy is a disaster. He says our country is weak and that no one beyond our borders respects us. None of that is true, but the big lies totalitarians tell are never true.[3]

Beyond that, Trump does what Hitler did. He names who is responsible for all of the country’s supposed troubles. Hitler said it was the Jews. Trump says it is people who are not like “us.” He means people who aren’t white, who aren’t evangelical Christians (though Trump is no kind of Christian at all himself), and, most of all, who weren’t born here. Migrants coming into our country play very much the same role for Trump as Europe’s Jews played for Hitler. They are primarily responsible, Trump says, for all of America’s real and made-up problems. He tells a significant portion of the American population, namely, white Christian men, that people who are not white Christian men are stealing their jobs. Trump says immigrants are all rapists and murderers, never mind that the crime rate among such people is actually lower than it is among native born Americans. Emigres, Jews, and Muslims are, Trump says, the bad guys in American life today, and millions upon millions of Americans believe him.

The Nazis murdered six million Jews and millions of other people. They forced Jews to dig pits, then shot them so that they fell dead into the pits they had dug. They built Auschwitz and other death camps where they worked some people to death and gassed an enormous number of others. We’ve all seen the horrific pictures of what the Nazis did. Many of us have heard Holocaust survivors speak about the horror they experienced. Many of us have read written accounts of that horror. There are deranged people in our country today who deny that it happened, but there is no doubt about it. Nazi Germany committed one of the worst crimes against humanity in human history.

Let me make this clear. As of today, I don’t expect Trump and his MAGA followers to build an American Auschwitz should they come to power early next year. He has said that he wants to build concentration camps to hold the millions of people he says he is going to deport, but so far he hasn’t said that there will be any gas chambers in them. I cling to the hope that Americans could never capitulate to Trump the way the Germans capitulated to Hitler. That Americans would never do to anyone what Hitler’s SS did to Europe’s Jews and to so many others.

Nonetheless, Trump has created an atmosphere in which we have to ask: Could we do to Trump’s scapegoats what Hitler and his Germans did to his? Trump is laying a foundation not radically different from the one Hitler and the Nazis laid in Germany before they undertook the worst of their oppression of the Jews. Trump is an American fascist, and he has come closer to turning the federal government fascist than anyone else ever has. I don’t know that he would ever ask Americans to commit crimes against humanity the way Hitler’s Nazis did, but neither am I completely convinced that he never would.

So we have ask: Could we? Would we? Would let ourselves be led along a path from cheering as a group of thugs torment a young woman for wanting to marry the man she loved to turning on the gas at an American Auschwitz? Could we ever turn on that gas? We like to answer that question, No! Never! But American history says something different. We white Americans have already committed genocide once. We did it against the First Nations of North America. We stole their land. We broke every treaty we signed with them. We shot them. We starved them. We gave them diseases they could not fight off. Hitler thought America would never complain about what he was going to do to Europe’s Jews because America had already done it to the Indians. The country generally but the American South in particular has a horrendous history of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation against Black Americans enforced through the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizens Council, and other terrorist organizations. Hitler thought the South’s Jim Crow laws were a good model for how he wanted to remake Germany.

So let’s not get complacent. The last thing we need is to get ourselves into a position where we have to decide: Could we? Would we? We have many things in common with the Germans of 1933. The most significant thing we have in common with them is that both they and we are human beings. The Holocaust is something human beings did. World War II is something human beings started and fought with the result of millions of casualties. Human beings did all of that killing, and we Americans are human beings.

We’ve done more than our share of killing in both domestic and foreign wars. We’ve committed genocide. We’ve enslaved, dehumanized, and oppressed people because of the color of their skin. We like to think that we’re the world’s good guys, and in some ways we are. But our hands are hardly clean. Could we dirty them further? Would we ever dirty them further? Time will tell.

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[1] Larson, Erik, In the Garden of Beasts, Love Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (Broadway Books, New York, 2011) in Chapter 11, “Strange Beings.”

[2] MAGA stands for Make America Great Again, which was the slogan of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

[3] Actually, part of it may be true. Certainly, our allies around the world are more apprehensive about us than they used to be; but that’s only because Donald Trump was the US president from January 2017 to January 2021. Trump can destroy anyone’s trust in America better than anyone else can.