​It Can Happen Here

By Ed Raymond 

fargogadfly@gmail.com

How Did Germany Recover From Committing the Holocaust?

I have been asking this question for decades after reading such books as “The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich” by William L. Shirer, still the definitive history of Hitler days, particularly 1932 to 1945. I was in eighth grade when Adolf and Eva committed suicide after murdering more than six million Jews, homosexuals, and physically and mentally handicapped members of society, and essentially causing the death of 24 million more humans in war.

I never miss baseball’s playoffs or World Series because I “wasted” 16 years playing and coaching the game of inches. But I have to be doing something else while watching TV. This year I decided to review a book published in 2009 I read a dozen years ago, titled “The Holocaust Chronicle: A History In Words and Pictures.” Published as a non-profit, it is 765 pages on high-quality heavy paper because it contains 2,000 photographs and a 3,000-item timeline that covers atrocities committed by the Nazis. Reviewing it, I decided to list the pages where and how a few of the inhumane acts were committed so I could find them easily in the future.

After listening and reading about Trump and his Trumplicans attempting to turn their insurrection at the capitol into a tourist caravan; after seeing that anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and armed anti-government forces were sponsoring a big political rally in Bismarck; after seeing thousands of Trump’s QAnoners lining the streets of Dallas waiting for the very dead John Kennedy, Jr. to lead their rally, I decided that another holocaust could happen here.

In the Bible (Numbers) is the phrase “What Hath God Wrought?” As Donald Trump is “The Chosen One” by fundamentalist Christians, what is their answer to “What Hath Trump Wrought?” January 6, Gosar, Brooks, Taylor-Greene, Boebert, Trump and his minions have started another holocaust. Death threats from the Trump cult to Vice-President Mike Pence, congressmen, and school board members and their children prove that.

Remember, Trump said: “I have the right to do anything I want as president.” And to add to that, we have 435 million firearms in this country—with many in the wrong hands. Do American Nazis know what German Nazis did to fellow human beings in an attempt to create a White master race? Book-burning and professor-hating Trumplicans should study Hitler’s statement in a 1938 speech: “We still have a need for intellectual classes, but one day we could, I don’t know, exterminate them or something.” Read “The Holocaust Chronicle,” and particularly the following pages I have listed with a quote or brief statement.

377: Picture of dead Jew hanging on electric fence after being told to run into it or be shot.

378: “One night we were awakened by terrifying cries. And we discovered from the men working the Sonderkommando…that on the preceding day, the gas supply having run out, they had thrown the children into the furnaces alive.”

381: Picture of Nazis shooting naked Jewish women in a mass grave after some were still living after being machine-gunned.

387: A Nazi guard asks a Jewish woman to hand him her baby. When she immediately does, the guard smashes the baby to the street head-first, killing it. Jewish men from a small town are shipped to a slave-labor camp while 400 old people are shot in the town cemetery.

391: A picture of a circle of Jewish musicians playing the song and music “Tango of Death” ordered by a Nazi commander. The prisoner in the middle of the circle is to be tortured and shot while the music is played. The song is also played every morning and night as prisoners go to and return from work.

396: A picture of a Jew who has been frozen to death in an ice hole. “The Nazis murdered their victims in a variety of ways, not just by shooting and gassing. Many camp guards became notorious for their cruelty, trying to outdo each other in devising fiendish methods of killing their victims.

409: “An SS instruction sheet for implementation of death sentences at extermination camps decrees that executions by hanging carried out by designated (Jewish) prisoners; payment will be three cigarettes.”

415: Picture: “Millions of Jews were deported to their deaths in cattle cars such as this. Up to 100 human beings were crammed into spaces that measured 31’6” x 14’ x 13’2”. The journey to a concentration camp was an unimaginably terrifying experience. Once the doors were sealed, the occupants were deprived of water and proper sanitation facilities. Thousands of people died enroute and others went insane. On more than one occasion, parents and children engaged in lethal struggles for a crust of bread or a drink of water.”

417: A picture of thousands of hair and shaving brushes removed from the executed. They were sent to Germany to be sold or distributed to Nazi soldiers.

425: SS chief Heinrich Himmler gets a report from Auschwitz death camp on items taken from the executed: 155,000 women’s coats, 132,000 men’s shirts, and 6,600 pounds of women’s hair.

443: Picture of a mountain of hundreds of thousands of shoes taken from Auschwitz victims. It appears to be about 30 feet high.

457: In 1943 Nazi propaganda minister wrote: “So far as concerns us, we have burned our bridges behind us, we can no longer turn back, nor do we want to turn back. We shall go down as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as its greatest criminals.”

462: A section called the “The Technology of Death,'' which reviews the construction of gas chambers, cremation ovens, and the use of conveyor belts between gas chambers and ovens to speed up the process of Jewish death.

465: The Nazi commander of a Poland work camp often stood out on his balcony office and shot and killed Jewish prisoners for sport who came into his riflesight from his high perch. This atrocity was filmed in the movie “Schindler’s List.”

466: At Auschwitz the Nazis formed six orchestras of Jewish prisoner-musicians to play cheerful and comforting tunes as the railroad cars of death came to the station. The orchestras were also forced to play for the SS guards and troops. The orchestras always ended their concerts with “Tango of Death.”

468: A Gestapo agent, angered that a young man enjoyed the downfall of fellow fascist Mussolini, hung the youth upside down, cut off his penis and put it in his mouth, and kicked his stomach until he died.

478: In 1943, a Nazi warehouse in Poland takes delivery of 12 freight cars of shoes taken from Jews as they marched into gas chambers instead of showers.

479: In Majdanek, a Nazi Poland death camp, prisoners spent October in 1943 digging three huge trenches. In November of 1943, the orchestras played trying to drown out the sound of machine guns killing 18,000 Jews in one day and filling those trenches.

487: In 1943, when the Nazis started to think they might lose the war, they had Jewish prisoners dig up millions of corpses and send the bones through bone-crushing machines the Nazis developed to eliminate evidence. It later would be spread on farms as fertilizer.

490: The Nazis tried to keep track of everything they used to create a thousand-year “Reich.” In 1942 Auschwitz used 8.2 tons of the powerful pesticide Zyklon B to kill Jews and others, In 1943 they used 13.4 tons manufactured by I.C. Farben to continue the holocaust.

500: A picture of four live young naked Gypsy boys with their penises and testicles removed in a Nazi study “to control unwanted population growth.” To Nazi doctors human suffering was totally irrelevant.

510: A picture of a live woman who had her entire calf muscle removed in an experiment by Nazi doctors to see whether the operation might work on Nazi soldiers with leg wounds. Half of the 24 women used in this experiment died after the operation.

519: Nazis are concerned they are losing the war so they order Jews to dig up mass graves in Lithuania and burn the bodies. Jew Isaac Dogim is forced to dig up the moldering bodies of his wife, three sisters, and three nieces.

525: A picture of a “mountain” of shoes being sorted into piles of sizes by Jewish women in the Auschwitz death camp.

532: “The Germans attempted to destroy Jewish hearts, souls, minds, and bodies in many ways, often involving excrement….Camp barracks were running rivers of filth, filled with dirt, vomit, disease, and excrement. At the Bergen-Belsen, Germany camp, one latrine served 30,000 prisoners. Many prisoners tied string around their trousers to catch their excrement, thus saving themselves from being beaten or killed for taking time to go to the latrine.

573: A picture of a Jewish child with lymph nodes removed by Nazi doctors in a study of TB.

595: Ilse Koch, called “The Bitch Of Buchenwald,” picked out prisoners with tattoos, had them killed and stripped, and then made them into lampshades. A picture of the tattoos is included.

598 and 599: A 1945 picture of American troops walking through thousands of dead Jews lying in the street of the death camp at Nordhausen, Germany. Many of the American veterans of the war had seen horrible things, but became “ill and vomiting, throwing up at the smell of death.” A picture of thousands of bodies abandoned by the Germans in April, 1945, is included.

601: An American reporter at Bergen-Belsen death camp: “One woman came up to a soldier who was guarding the milk store and doling out milk to children, and begged for milk for her baby. The man took the baby and saw it had been dead for days, black in the face and shriveled up. The woman went on begging for milk. So he poured some on the dead lips. The mother started to croon with joy and carried the baby off in triumph. She stumbled and fell dead in a few yards.”

609: American soldier Jack Hallett, upon entering Dachau death camp in 1945: “First thing I saw was a stack of bodies—oh, twenty feet long and about as high as a man could reach…and the thing I will never forget was the fact that closer inspection found people whose eyes were still blinking maybe three or four deep in the stack.”

612: Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and his wife committed suicide by cyanide on May 1, 1945. Before suicide, he and his wife had a Nazi doctor kill their six children with morphine overdoses. Then subordinates burned all the bodies.

624: A picture of a naked Jewish woman who has had her breasts operated on by Nazi doctors who may have been experimenting with breast cancer operations.

A French prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials summed up the Third Reich: “Germany allowed itself to be robbed of its conscience and its very soul. Evil masters came who awakened its primitive passions and made possible the atrocities which I have described to you. In truth, the crime of these men is that they caused the German people to regress more than 12 centuries.” The German Nazi Party under Hitler is responsible for the deaths of 19,207,000 from 29 European countries killed in 25 major death camps. Another 24 million were killed in fighting the war in the European theater.