Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:50 pm
Talk about getting it backwards. There is no rehabilitating Adolf Hitler’s image. Sure, Hitler loved kids, as long as they were German (read: not Jew or Slav or of some other ‘mongrel’ race). Balance his appearance with children against the activities of the 101st Police Battalion, which was busy by 1942 murdering entire villages of people.
Duke said,
The reason there’s a war on Donald Trump is because there’s a war on the real America, there’s a war on the European-American majority of the United States of America. The media has been the ones inciting hatred and violence. They have portrayed Donald Trump as a vicious racist who basically wants to create a Hitlerian regime; that’s what they present him as, which is, of course, the biggest boogeyman and the most hateful thing these days you can say about something…
The truth is, by the way, they might be rehabilitating that fellow with the mustache back there in Germany, because I saw a commercial against Donald Trump, a really vicious commercial, comparing what Donald Trump said about preserving America and making America great again to Hitler in Germany preserving Germany and making Germany great again and free again and not beholden to these Communists on one side, politically who were trying to destroy their land and their freedom, and the Jewish capitalists on the other, who were ripping off the nation through the banking system. We have the same thing going on here with Goldman Sachs.
Listen courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
According to Duke, “This war that’s going on against Donald Trump is really a war going on against America, it’s a war going on against the European-American majority.” In fact, this sounds a lot like Hitler talking. The German majority was under constant attack by ‘mongrel’ races from within and without.
Hitler had a solution for that. So let’s look at what Duke says will be rehabilitated:
Take Nazi plans for their ‘Drang nach Osten,’ (Drive toward the East) which would involve the ‘spatial repression’ – a Nazi euphemism for ‘displacement’ (kicking people out of their homes and forcibly removing them) of at least 35 million people according one version of Generalplan Ost (GPO), or ‘Master Plan East.’
Hitler had a fear of Russian Bolshevism that we might equate with Trump’s Mexican obsession and his forcible removal of 11 million people. Needless to say, for Hitler as for Trump, undesirables were not going to be allowed to emigrate. All travel would be in the other direction for those who were not “German” or, in Trump’s case, “American enough.”
The Nazi total did not include Jews, of course, an estimated 8,391,000 of them in the East. They were to be exterminated as a matter of course.
All in all, the man Duke would rehabilitate planned, according to Generalplan Ost, “the violent death of 21,266,000 individuals, starved to death, exterminated by work, or killed by mobile killing units and in the death camps.” In the words of scholar Christian Ingrao (Believe & Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine, 2013),
The practice of genocide, which had been in operation since 1941, was not just integrated into the planning: it had even become a condition of Germanization, the final aim of the Nazi utopia.
There are those, of course, who deny the holocaust. But the Nazis were meticulous record keepers. And we have those records, many of them, despite frantic attempts at destruction as the Reich collapsed around them. We know what was said. What was planned. What Hitler approved of.
In fact, we have the exhibition catalog for “Planning and development in the east,” what Ingrao describes as “glossy paper with the RKFdV [The Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood] crest…adorned with photos, maps, and plans,” comprising one of the most complete representations of the SS project.
The Nazi leadership’s anxiety over racial impurity extended to what was intended to be a “Germanization front” across the east, a cordon sanitaire running from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea occupied by colonies of German SS peasant-soldiers. The Nazis had crunched the numbers and despite rising birthrates since 1933 only 4.5 million Germans, including ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) and ‘captured German blood’ (liberated from Bolshevik rule) could be found to replace the displaced natives.
The fact is, the Nazis, like white supremacist Americans like Duke, recognized the need for more white babies, and they talked in their policy papers of awakening a Wille zum Kind (Desire for a child) in their colonists in order to contest the ‘monstrous way our neighbors in the East are increasing their numbers.’
How was this monstrous growth counterbalanced? See the photo above. Ingrao puts the activities of the four German Einsatzgruppen (literally ‘deployment groups’ i.e. death squads) in perspective:
In the USSR, the groups executed over 5550,000 persons: 50,000 from 22 June to the end of August, and 500,000 between September and December 1941. Thus, they killed 55 times more than in Poland: a number that, if projected to the idividual level, would imply that each of the 3,000 men operating in Russia must have killed one person per day over six months.
A Viennese policeman engaged in these activities wrote home to his wife that he had “volunteered for a special action” the next day and had too few bullets for his pistol (only 28), because there were about 1200 Jews “who need to be killed” (his words).
He writes he has some “nice things” to tell his wife when he gets back. It’s hard to imagine what. In this way groups of 8,000 to 18,000 people were regularly being exterminated by these units in towns across Western Russia during Hitler’s invasion.
Duke claimed, “if you love your country and if you love, or at least what your country is supposed to represent, what it originally represented, because I don’t know if we can everything love our government — we certainly can’t love everything our government is doing today,” that “If you’re a European person, the government is purposefully wiping you out and your families and your children and your future.”
This is, in a nutshell, what the Nazis thought of the democratic Weimar regime they overthrew in 1933. Hitler warned that his country was having its greatness taken away from it too.
There is no rehabilitating Hitler, and there can be no rehabilitating Donald Trump. He has talked the talk and earned every comparison to Hitler made. To the extent he has been able, he has also walked the walk, encouraging violent behavior among his followers, demanding a personal oath of loyalty and even an exchange of the Hitler salute.
Comparisons of Trump to Hitler don’t rehabilitate Hitler. They only damn Trump.
Photo credit of execution of Jews by Einsatzgruppen near Ivangorod, Ukraine: By Unknown (Sometimes mistakenly attributed to Jerzy Tomaszewski who discovered it.) – Original publication: Zwiazek Bojowników o Wolnosc i Demokracje / League of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy / Union des Combattants pour la Liberté et la Démiocratie / Verband der Kämpfer für Freiheit und Demokratie (1959) 1939-1945. We have not forgotten / Nous n’avons pas oublié / Wir haben es nicht vergessen., Warsaw: Polonia, pp. 267 no ISBN (multilingual book)[3][2]Latest digital copy from www.levandehistoria.se, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3580125
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