What do we learn from history?

What do we learn from history? Nothing.

Beginning in 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he persuaded his cabinet to declare a state of emergency and end individual freedoms, including freedom of press, speech and assembly. The citizens of Germany lost the right to privacy, which meant the Hitler’s officials could read people’s mail, listen to their telephone conversations and search their homes without warrant.  

Hitler solely relied on terror to achieve his goals of becoming the most powerful dictator the world had ever seen. He lured tens of thousands of young, jobless men with promises of high wages, comradeship, and striking uniforms. These Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilungen) also referred to as the SA were policemen who took to the streets to beat up and kill anyone who stood in the way of the Nazi regime.

Shortly after taking office Hitler appointed Nazi governors to govern the German states. He replaced the elected officials with Nazi appointees. He completely eliminated Germany’s state government. Next, they seized the trade unions and by the middle of 1933 the Nazi party was the state party and all other political parties were extinguished thus becoming a one-party dictatorship.

Once democracy was defeated, the Nazi’s orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign to win the cooperation of Germans. All forms of communication include newspapers, magazines, books, public meeting, rallies, art, music, movies, radio, and viewpoints that in any way threatened the Nazi beliefs or regime were censored or eliminated from all media.

The following is a short timeline of events that led to Nazi Germany:

February 1920: What was first called the German Workers’ Party, the Nazi party holds their first meeting. Adolf Hitler issues his “25 Point Program” outlining the party’s political agenda. The party platform embodies racism. Hitler was obsessed with racial purity in Germany, proclaiming Germany’s destiny to rule over the inferior races and he identifies Jews as a racial enemy. He concludes that “No Jew, therefore, may be a member of the Nation.”

June 1925: The first volume of Mein Kampf is published, while Adolf Hitler is imprisoned for treason following his failed attempt to overthrow the German government in 1923. Mein Kampf furthered detailed Hitler’s views on race. He saw history as the struggle between races for living space and envisioned a way of conquest in the east, where Slavic people would be enslaved to German interests. Jews were exceptionally vile, and he urged the “removal” of Jews from Germany.

January 1933: Adolf Hitler becomes German Chancellor.

February 1933: Reichstag, the German Parliament, building is destroyed by fire. Hitler convinces the German President, Paul von Hindenburg, to declare a state of emergency claiming that the Communists committed the arson. This state of emergency suspended constitutionally protected freedoms. It also allowed for the arrest of “potential” opponents of the regime without trial or judicial proceedings. Prisoners were placed in camps that were initially established by the Storm Troopers (SA) but later came under the authority of the chief of the SS, which was the elite guard of the Nazi state.

March 1933: The Nazis fail to win the majority in the German Parliament elections, but Hitler introduces a bill that would give his government power to decree laws without submitting them to a vote in the German Parliament. The bill was passed because many Communist and Socialist opponents were arrested before the vote on the bill. During this same month, Dachau camp, became one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazis. SS chief Heinrich Himmler announced it’s opening, and the first prisoners arrived on March 22, 1933. Dachau camp remained in operation from 1933 until 1945.

Nazi student organizations, professors, and librarians made a list of books that they believed should not be read by Germans. They marched in parades at night, sang chants, and threw books into huge bonfires. Most of the works were of Jewish writers, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Books by non-Jewish writers such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis, were also burned because their ideas were viewed as different from the Nazi’s and therefore, they should not and would not be read by Germans.

Schools played a vital role in spreading Nazi ideas. Only newly written books that spoke of blind leadership to the Nazi part, love for Hitler and antisemitism were taught. Many young school children were members of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, where they were trained to be faithful to the Nazi party.

June 1933: The Nazi state establishes the racial purity law that requires state regulation on human reproduction. Hitler issues the Law to Prevent Hereditarily Diseased Offspring and the measure prohibits “undesirables” from having children and forces sterilization of certain physically or mentally impaired individuals. Over the next 18 months, roughly 400,000 people are affected by this law.

June 1934: The Night of the Long Knives- Storm Trooper (SA) leadership and any other opponents of Adolf Hitler were arrested and shot without trial. More than 80 SA officers were killed.

August 1934: President von Hindenburg dies, and Hitler assumes the powers of the presidency. The army swears an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler as their Reich President (head of state), Reich Chancellor (head of government), and Fuehrer (leader of the Nazi Party).

September 1935: The Nuremberg Laws legalized a racist hierarchy by defining Jews by “blood” and ordered the total separation of the so-called “Aryans” and “non-Aryans”. Under this law Jews were defined as someone with three or four Jewish grandparents. This included many Roman Catholic priests and nuns and Protestant ministers whose grandparents were Jewish.

November 1935: The Nuremberg Law was extended to other groups to prohibit the marriage or sexual relations between people who could produce “racially suspect” offspring. The Nazis interpreted this to mean relations between “those of German or related blood” and Roma (Gypsies), black people, or their offspring.

November 1938: Nazis destroyed Jewish synagogues and shop windows of Jewish-owned stores all throughout Germany and Austria. This was the turning point where genocide would become the singular focus of Nazi antisemitism.

October 1939: Hitler authorizes the Euthanasia Program, which leads to the killing of those Germans whom the Nazis saw as “unworthy of life”. In the beginning, the doctors and nurses were encouraged to neglect the patients. Most patients either died of starvation or diseases. Later, groups of “consultants” were brought in to decide who would die. Those patients were sent to “euthanasia” killing centers and were killed either by lethal injection or the gas chambers.

August 1941: Hitler began receiving mounting public criticism from the “euthanasia” killings and this prompts him to end this program. By this time, about 70,000 German and Austrian physically or mentally impaired patients have been killed. Although the program has officially ended, it continues in secret.

May 1945: The Nazi forces surrender. By this time 6 million Jews; 1.3 million Soviet civilians; 3 million Soviet prisoners of war; 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians; 312,000 Serb civilians; 250,000 physically or mentally handicapped; 250,000 Romas; 1,900 Jehovah’s Witnesses; 70,000 repeat criminal offenders and so-called asocial; an undetermined amount of German political opponents and resistance activists; and thousands of homosexuals were dead.

I have done a poor job of recounting all that occurred during the Nazi regime, and I did not include every event, but I did attempt to pull pivotal events from history to show readers how quickly Adolf Hitler rose to power and how swiftly he built an army of murderers.

Over the course of 20 years, more than 14 million innocent people lost their lives because one individual instilled violence and fear into the hearts of his fellow countrymen. He began in his home country and he blasted his sick, radical beliefs into anyone who would listen. He garnered a large following of likeminded people and those that chose not to follow were either forced to adhere to his beliefs or be killed. Individualism was not embraced but was forbidden.

Reliving history is not on my life’s agenda, but I do believe that if we do not awaken from our slumber our great nation will be doomed to repeat history. The only difference will be the location. It will not be Nazi Germany again; it will be Nazi America.