I spent some time at the Sauchsenhausen Concentration Camp outside Berlin, and I was amazed at how freshly the Holocaust can hit you, no matter how much you have learned about it already. Two things stuck with me in particular.
The first came early on when our tour guide gave us some background knowledge on exactly how someone like Hitler or Mussolini was able to come to power. The guide was a gifted speaker, his rhetoric was poetic in its parallelism which consisted of a sequence of descriptions that always began, “A fascist will...” And the thing that struck me most about this description (and it is possible that it was intended this way) was that nearly everything that was said could also have been applied to talk about how Trump has recently come to power.
For example: a fascist will contradict himself. Mussolini would make speeches to farmers about how the people in the cities were living like kings while the farmers did all the hard work and had nothing. Then he would go to the cities and talk to factory workers about how people in the country were living like kings while the factory workers were doing all that hard labor and had nothing. And as a result he gained widespread support-- because everyone felt like he understood and spoke for them, but he didn’t speak for them. He said what he thought they wanted to hear.
And you may think that, yeah, that could have worked back then, but now we have smart phones, mass media, and the internet-- so if someone contradicts himself, everyone will know and that person won’t be able to do what the fascists of the past were able to do. But you would not be right about this because people still hear what they want to hear. They latch on and identify with ideas that resonate with them, and once this happens they are willing to overlook everything else. Yeah, Hitler says the Jews are bad, they might think, but Hitler doesn’t mean Jews like my friend David. He means those other bad Jews. Yeah, he imprisons political threats, I guess, (shrug) but he’s going to make Germany great again!
These last four words, by the way, were one of Hitler’s political slogans, because a fascist uses nationalism to his advantage. He uses ideas of large-scale pride and change to get people on his side. Your average voter is not politically savvy. They simply want somebody they can identify with, someone who seems to tell it straight. They do not want to listen to some intellectual outline in detail a specific plan and the research backing it up. They can’t identify with this intellectual. They want the guy that speaks their language.
The second thing which has stuck with me (very much related to the first) was how things escalated to such an extreme where tens of thousands of German people were willingly contributing to the horrific acts that occurred. It’s easy to blame the leaders, but they were not able to do what they did without a lot of people going along with them. How did Germany go from being a strong nation contributing on many levels to the development of the world before 1915 to a less strong but still proud country by 1925 to a broken country where a guy like Hitler is gaining popularity in 1935, to the mass-murdering enemy of much of the world by 1945?
In summary, Germany got screwed by the combined results of World War 1 and the Great Depression, which allowed a persuasive speaker like Hitler to get a following. Because people listened to him (and because people were so anti-Communist) they allowed him into a position of power knowing he had extreme ideas because, hey, at least he wasn’t a Communist. Hitler than recruited the police and the military to his side and got them to eliminate all of his political opposition. These police and military men made other people so afraid that more and more people became informants and/or joined the Nazi party simply to try and avoid being considered a political threat themselves.
Hitler also rewarded extreme ideas in his leaders, which understandably resulted in those leaders seeking further extremes in order to gain favor themselves. This encouragement of selfish thinking was dangerous.
More dangerous (and ingenious in some ways) was the diffusion of responsibility that enabled the mass murders of the Holocaust. It started out with Nazis simply being ordered to shoot people en masse. After a while, Himmler recognized that this was having a negative psychological impact on the soldiers doing the shooting. Only after that did they start using things like gas chambers. The idea was to divide up the responsibility of the mass murders so that no one felt individually like a murderer. If a bunch of people were to be suffocated with exhaust fumes, one soldier would put the people in the van. Another would connect the exhaust pipe to the interior. And a third would actually drive the van around. If people were to be individually and unknowingly executed, one man would lead them into a room. A man in a different room would press a button causing death without seeing it. Then another man would come dispose of the bodies. The Nazis were able to do this much more easily and with less psychological downside for them.
And the mass murders were not always part of the plan. It got to that point in phases. It started out mainly as imprisonment and isolation of people who were considered political threats. Then it was realized that all these people could be economically useful (in the form of free labor) and so they were inhumanely exploited. This stepping stone of less humane treatment combined with Hitler’s strong personality-based leadership combined with the war turning against the Nazis in the last few years all made it easier for the mass murders to take place.
Something the Germans have really taken to heart, which I’ve seen in museums and on tours, is the idea of learning from the mistakes of the past. They do not try to cover up or deny any of the awful things that happened here less than a century ago. Other countries (and I’m thinking especially of China and the U.S.A. right now) would do well to have a more similar mindset. China still censors its people in many ways and it is taboo to talk in detail about any of the questionable acts that have happened during and since the Communist revolution. Americans and their politicians frequently make short-sighted decisions using incomplete reasoning as support for these decisions in addition to downplaying their overly domineering military presence in the world both past and present.
It is easy and common for people to still associate Germany with Nazism, but I urge folks to (if they must to this) do this not in a condemning way but rather with a conscientious mind, one that seeks to find some meaning in all that happened and use that meaning to ensure that the world continues to be a better place than it was in 1945. Because phrases like “make Germany great again” or “make America great again” have something inherently false about them. There was never a point in the past where either nation was without flaw. Progress in general is such that in most cases, both countries (and most countries) are at their best right now-- with memories of past greatness being greatly influenced by nostalgia or better circumstances for individual people rather than the nation as a whole. Phrases like these are designed to ignite nationalistic fervor which, once ignited, is very easy to manipulate.
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