Broken glass and the path to Hell

By Distributorcap

Today -- November 9th -- is the 72nd anniversary of the what many consider the start of the Holocaust -- Kristallnacht -- The Night of Broken Glass. It was a two day rampage throughout the Third Reich on November 9-10, 1938 that finally told the Jews of Germany -- their time was up.

Even though the Nazis had began passing laws to restrict the rights of German Jews in 1933, many of the 500,000 Jews living in Germany proper refused to believe their world was closing down -- after all they were born in Germany, part of its "society" and many had fought for the Kaiser during World War I. But none of that mattered to the Nazis. After the initial laws were passsed, it only got worse. In 1935, Hitler personally signed the infamous Nuremberg Laws -- which prohibited Jews from being citizens and made intermarriage between Germans and Jews/Gypsies/blacks illegal and punishable.

At this point, many of the wealthier the Jews realized what was going on. However, the world's borders began to shut -- as fewer and fewer nations were willing to take in the German refugees, especially Jews. On October 18, 1938, Hitler ordered 12,000 Polish born Jews expelled - they were given only a few hours to leave and not allowed to take most of their property. The Nazis seized what was left behind. They were dropped at the Polish border.

The turning point came when Herschel Grynspyn, a 17-year old German Jew enraged by his family's expulsion from Germany, walked into the German Embassy in Paris on November 6, 1938 and fired five shots at a minor German diplomat Ernst vom Rath "in the name of the 12,000 Jews." Two days later, the ambassador died.

The German government's reaction was swift and harsh. On November 8, all Jewish publications were shut down. Jewish children were banned from attending "Aryan" schools and all Jewish cultural activities were suspended. But the legal steps were not enough for a good portion of the population that was filled with hate and animosity toward the Jews. Within hours, Germany found itself in the grip of skillfully orchestrated and severe anti-Jewish violence. Businesses and homes were destroyed, Jews were beaten and arrested, the angry mobs could not be controlled (frankly the German police did nothing to quell the violence). November 10th was also the 455th anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. Many Germans used Luther's pamphlet Jews and Their Lies as another justification for the violence.

Over 25,000 Jews were arrested and deported to concentration camps like Dachau. 200 synagogues were burned and vandalized, thousands of Jewish businesses were simply destroyed. Joseph Goebbels justified German behavior during Kristallnacht as "healthy instincts."

The world did react, albeit tepidly - the U.S. recalled its ambassador, but did not break off diplomatic relations. While world opinion turned against Hitler's regime, the West sat back and did nothing. Nothing stopped the Nazis from their growing militarism, power and continued persecution. It only fueled more German nationalism.

Kristallnacht was a precursor of things to come. Germany was never the same - Hitler had his excuse to begin his systematic persecution and ultimately murder of the Jews. Hermann Goring further foreshadowed the impending Final Solution. On November 11th, the day after Kristallnacht he stated, "The Jewish problem will reach its solution if, in any time soon, we will be drawn into war beyond our border -- then it is obvious that we will have to manage a final account with the Jews." For the Jews under German control, their fate was sealed. On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland -- and World War II began. Five and half years later -- the world would come to know what Auschwitz, Belzec, Buchenwald, Sobibor, and Treblinka really were.  By that time 6 million were nothing but ashes.

In 1988, historian Max Rein wrote "Kristallnacht came and everything was changed."

Ironically, on November 9, 1989 -- 61 years after Kristallnacht, the Berlin Wall was opened -- thus ending the division of Germany and paving the way for reunification. In many ways, the end of the Cold War coincided with the ultimate end of World War II.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana, Life of Reason (1905) 

Don't think something this horrendous cannot happen here. There are people with power and influence in this country who are capable of this.

Postcards from a sad edge

By J. Thomas Duffy

If the Teabaggers think they have it tough, being called names, dissed, and otherwise, not taken seriously, it's a walk-in-the-park compared to others.

At least they are not being murdered for their opposition, for slandering the President, the government



Roger Cohen, in today's NYT Op-Ed page, has a great read - "The Banality of Good";

What was it like? I would ask myself, the years I lived in Berlin. What was it like in the leafy Grunewald neighborhood to watch your Jewish neighbors — lawyers, businessmen, dentists — trooping head bowed to the nearby train station for transport eastward to extinction?

With what measure of fear, denial, calculation, conscience and contempt did neighbors who had proved their Aryan stock to Hitler’s butchers make their accommodations with this Jewish exodus? How good did the schnapps taste and how effectively did it wash down the shame?

How's them apples for an opener?

Cohen quickly elucidates;

Now I know. Thanks to Hans Fallada’s extraordinary “Every Man Dies Alone,” just published in the United States more than 60 years after it first appeared in Germany, I know. What Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” did for wartime France after six decades in obscurity, Fallada does for wartime Berlin. Like all great art, it transports, in this instance to a world where, “The Third Reich kept springing surprises on its antagonists: It was vile beyond all vileness.”

Fallada, born Rudolf Ditzen, wrote his novel in less than a month right after the war and just before his death in 1947 at the age of 53. The Nazi hell he evokes is not so much recalled as rendered, whole and alive. The prose is sinuous and gritty, like the city he describes. Dialogue often veers toward sadistic folly with a barbaric logic that takes the breath away.

"Vile beyond all vileness ..."

I don't know if you can even begin comprehending, processing such a magnitude of evil.

The book is based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel, whose postcard campaign — “Hitler’s war is the worker’s death!” — frustrated the Gestapo until the couple’s capture in October 1942 and subsequent beheading. Fallada, a sometime morphine addict who lived in and out of asylums, got hold of the Hampel police files through a friend in late 1945, wrote a journalistic account that year, and then, in a burst of creativity, the novel.

[snip]

The book pulses with the street life of a terrorized city, full of sleaze, suspicion, drunkenness, desperation and murder. It proclaims the bestial sadism of which man is capable and the enormous moral stature of decency. It has something of the horror of Conrad, the madness of Dostoyevsky and the chilling menace of Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

Yikes!

From Elizabeth Bachner;

If Primo Levi told me to crawl underneath the Brooklyn bridge, naked, and read the graffiti there -- if he were here to suggest that -- I’d be swinging over the side of that bridge right now, even though it’s 30 degrees and the middle of rush hour.

[snip]

So when I heard that Primo Levi had declared Hans Fallada’s long-obscure Every Man Dies Alone to be “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis,” I tucked into its 500 pages with a feeling of razor-sharp glee mixed with dread, worried and hopeful that it would make me unable to live in the same way anymore.

[snip]

Himmler planned on the Holocaust being an “unwritten page of glory.” Every unearthed manuscript or reprinted book like Every Man Dies Alone defeats that plan.

Go check out Cohn's entire article, it's a good one.


Bonus Links

Hans Fallada, From Wikipedia

Video of Anne Frank Surfaces on YouTube




(Cross Posted at The Garlic)

Pat Buchanan, Hitler apologist

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Yes, Pat Buchanan, he with the punditocratic platform at MSNBC, who blames Britain for starting WWII and essentially absolves Hitler of any and all responsibility for the war.

He doesn't deny the Holocaust, thankfully, but his history is revisionist fiction, including this:

Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps.

In other words, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened -- or at least wouldn't have been as large -- had Hitler gotten his way. The implication, of course, is that not just the war but the Holocaust was Britain's fault.

Hitler only wanted peace, don't you know. He gave the British ample opportunity -- forget his war of imperial conquest everywhere else.

This is appalling, among the worst I've ever heard or read from Buchanan. Why he still has his platform in the MSM is beyond me.

For more, make sure to check out Matt Yglesias's excellent rebuttal. See also Steve Benen (who rightly notes that Buchanan's "status in the media establishment [will go] unaffected"), dday at C&L, and Adam Serwer.

Craziest Republican of the Day: Paul Broun

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(Sorry, I meant to post this yesterday.)

The AP has the craziness:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism."

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

*****

"We can't be lulled into complacency," Broun said. "You have to remember that Adolf Hitler was elected in a democratic Germany. I'm not comparing him to Adolf Hitler. What I'm saying is there is the potential."

So Obama's not Hilter, but sort of, possibly? And he wants to do "exactly what Hitler did," but he's a Marxist?

Broun is clearly an idiot -- only an idiot would make such idiotic remarks -- but this is precisely the sort of fear- and smearmongering we're likely to get a lot more of going forward. McCain and Palin and their surrogates may have taken the anti-Obama lead during the campaign, with their mob-crazed rallies seething with hate and anger, if not outright bigotry, but anti-Obama rhetoric of this kind is all-too-common on the right. And, as Steve Benen noted, it's not like Broun is "some random nut" at some random right-wing blog. He's a member of Congress!

It should come as no surprise that right-wingers are embracing Broun. Check out RedState, for example: "Let me be the first to congratulate Representative Paul Broun to be the first to fire a shot at the Obama Agenda!" They're all crazy, it seems, and craziness will about in the "Guerrilla Congress."

The title of Jay Bookman's blog post at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution yesterday says it all: "U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Crazy." Broun is "the point at which the lunatic fringe and Republican officeholders intersect." All I must add is that that intersection is densely populated.

In actual fact, by the way, what Obama was proposing was not some sort of newfangled American Gestapo but rather "a civilian reserve corps that could handle postwar reconstruction efforts such as rebuilding infrastructure -- an idea endorsed by the Bush administration."

And, for the record, sincere or not, Broun has backed down: "I regret putting it that way. I apologize to anyone who has taken offense at that."

It wasn't offense that was taken, though, it was craziness that was called out.