…

 

I didn’t really choose my interest in History, it chose me, I think, and I need to remind myself that not everyone finds it so endlessly captivating.

Late last year, I began re-reading the classic and widely acclaimed, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer which won the National Book Award in 1961. I had read it originally while living abroad as a teen.

It is almost 2,000 pages long, the story of how one man led his party and his nation into mass murder on an industrial scale never before seen, eventually plunging the entire European continent into World War II.

More than 60 million people, most of them civilians, eventually died because of this one man, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler very nearly succeeded, which is why I believe the truth about those years is still so vital.

“This is the right time to retell this story for a younger generation as a cautionary tale.” That’s Joe Berlinger, an Academy Award nominated documentarian. 

Hitler took what he wanted (Austria, the Sudentenland, and Czechoslovakia) much like Putin, in Russia, has taken Crimea, which he got away with, claiming, as Hitler did in the 1930s, that Crimea had mostly Russian-speaking people and he was just reuniting them with their fellow Russians.

When Europe and America did not respond, Putin invaded Ukraine and has been waging a brutal war of attrition in pursuit of his personal territorial goals.

In 2022, when Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border, it was – and remains – the largest invasive war on the European continent since World War 2.

As with Hitler and the policy of appeasement in the late 1930s, America now wants to reward Putin for his aggression by negotiating the permanent transfer of large parts of Ukraine it now controls to Russia.

There are warning signs in America too.

“In America, we are in the midst of our own reckoning with democracy, with authoritarianism knocking at the door and a rise in antisemitism.”

Remember…Charlottesville…marching men carrying tiki torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us!…

The sudden dismantling of the federal government under the current administration’s hired gun, Elon Musk…

The demand for overt personal loyalty to one man, not the office, not the constitution, only Trump and his need for constant praise and adulation, for fealty and total submission…

The winks about running for a third term, although that would violate our constitution…fomenting the assault on our Capitol – that did violate our constitution – to invalidate the 2020 election so he could remain in power…

The overt, and repeated threats to take Greenland because he “needs” it.

Threatening federal judges and their families, attacking American universities and their funding, arresting legal residents and deporting them without court hearings, even burning books and changing national history lessons, denying truths about our past, wiping our national records of certain races and peoples, as was encouraged in Nazi Germany…

So, you can understand why many see ominous warning signs about the eventual goals of this administration.

Our parents and grandparents gave their youth, their lives, to save the world from Hitler.

They created NATO to – hopefully – make a continent-wide conflagration impossible, ushering in the most peaceful and economically successful period in human history!

They gave their money, through taxes, to rebuild the continent they had been forced to destroy to defeat fascism, dictatorship and genocide.

All of that is being casually tossed away as if it were nothing worth saving.

So, if you won’t read a 2000-page book about how authoritarianism took the world to war less than 100 years ago, a book which makes clear why some of us are alarmed today, I have an alternative…

the Netflix series based on William Shirer’s book, Hitler and the Nazi’s: Evil on Trial.

6 episodes, each containing the words, often the voice, of William Shirer, and many the voices of the main personalities that drove the world to war. You can read the reviews HERE.

I can’t recommend it highly enough!

At the least, take the time to understand the echoes of recent history that are making so many nervous at what they see happening in America today.

Don’t be caught, as the German people were, saying afterwards, “We never knew. We never understood.”

One final thing…if you’ve made it this far, let me leave you with something good, something hopeful.

Remember, for all those boys who stormed the beaches in Normandy, who flew in the B-17’s over Germany, who died fighting the Japanese all over the Pacific…

All the mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers who sacrificed to rebuild Europe and Japan, to show the best side of American democracy…

THIS is who we are, not the greed and callous disregard for humanity personified by Elon Musk and Donald Trump!